So ANYWAY today's reading has brought me through a lot of advertising history that is referenced in the show, specifically today, cigarette advertising.
So in the Pilot episode of the series, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Sterling Cooper are faced with a mammoth task of redesigning the way cigarettes are promoted, as their client Lucky Strike are feeling the pressure after the emergence that smoking is harmful to one's health. Imagine that. (Oh, 1960, you!)
One of the most interesting aspects of the episode comes when Don Draper is left speechless in the pitch to Lucky Strike and Pete, a junior executive, steps in with a play on the psychological research noting Freud death wish analysis that Don had refuted hours previously.
This death wish has been considered by critics to refer to the Marlboro Man campaign championed by Leo Burnett. In short it epitomized masculinity of that era. It incorporates notions of America's New Frontier along with suggesting a nostalgia for "when men were men", the virility of the cowboy.
The death wish hypothesis is in fact perfect for the marketing of cigarettes, especially in light of the (then) newly developed research.
"The death wish is fundamental Freud. He posited that men and women harbored a counterintuitive drive
toward self-destruction to counterbalance our will to live."
Natasha Vargas-Cooper. Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America.
I took to Google for a quick image search so I could see the campaign myself. Here I leave you with, the Evolution of the Marlboro Man. There is a defiant John Wayne and Eastwood thing going on.
No comments:
Post a Comment