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The pilot episode for the AMC television series Mad Men begins with white text on a black screen, the letters fading in as some vocal-band doo-wop plays in the background. The first phrase to appear is the name of the show, here referring to its eponymous advertising executives on which the show is focused. Under the words, there appears a definition for the phrase “mad men”: “A term coined in the late 1950s to describe the advertising executives of Madison Avenue.” Then, a second or two later, the punch line completing the first quote is revealed: “They coined it.”

Right from the get-go the entire ethos of the show Mad Men—and the people on the show who don this title by their own choosing—is laid our before us: these people are both completely devoted to the principles of advertising, so much so that they have taken to writing “ad copy” (the nickname) to “sell” themselves to the public.

The series Mad Men is performing the same dual purpose. Not only does it investigate the way in which advertisements on television can capture the emotions of the audience they wish to sway, but it does so in a way that is self-aware of its own mission—that is, it knows that it is a TV show that must use the art of advertising to turn itself into an appealing product. The series, with its intentional devotion to the glory of aesthetic design—the understanding that the style is the substance—operates on the same level as the advertisements its characters create, and does so in a way that provides deep insight into the alchemy of desire, the invention of want, the magic of advertising. And it’s a concept that would only work on television, and would only work on a channel that actually runs commercials (unlike HBO or Showtime, two networks creator Anthony Weiner pitched the show to before AMC finally took it on). The show needs the commercials to run during the episodes because they, too, are part of the content of the show; the ads that run during Mad Men are selected to appeal to the Mad Men audience, a group of people who have already “bought in” to the world of Sterling Cooper and its ad men.

So, the show Mad Men is about more than just the process of coming up with new advertisements in the face of a national culture at a precipice (the dawning of civil rights and free love that is to come in the mid-sixties). It’s about the relationship between this process and the way its products affect people—the way they affect the intended audience who sees it within the Mad Men world, the way they affect the characters who make them, and the way they affect the viewers of the show.

Because of this intertextualization of the show’s core concept, it can be said that Mad Men is about itself: it is about how television can be used to appeal to the masses—whether or not the broadcast is a scripted show, a news program, or an advertisement—through a fierce embracing of its aesthetic qualities, the embrace of a philosophy that allows for this approach to gain depth, and the way in which this approach to television is shaped by the changing mores of the country that watches it.

As well as setting up many of the internal and external struggles that will face the main characters in the coming seasons, the pilot episode of Mad Men also establishes the conceit that will guide its treatment of the onscreen advertisements (many of them genuine artifacts) that are “created” by the ad men at Sterling Cooper. Throughout the episode Don Draper, the creative director at the agency, is faced with the task of creating a new ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes. A study by Reader’s Digest has just levied claims against the tobacco industry that their products are dangerous, and Sterling Cooper is called upon to find a way to convince the buyers of Luckies to keep on smoking them, despite the potential risks. Don is advised to rely on the “death wish” of the potential readers of the ads (at this point, most of the ads are in print magazines; it is not until season two that television begins to play a larger role, though season one deals with television in a variety of ways as well, including the Kennedy campaign ads). Don takes a different approach: he discovers a random step in the process of making the cigarettes and focuses on that, thereby ignoring the threat of any potentially industry-destroying evidence. “It’s Toasted,” he writes on the chalkboard. “But everybody else’s tobacco is toasted,” the president of Lucky Strike says. “No, everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous,” Don counters. “Lucky Strike’s is toasted.” And then Don delivers an axiom-filled speech that does a good job of summing up his approach to advertising—both the ads he creates for the company, and the facades he creates in his own life to deceive others around him. “Advertising is based on one thing: happiness,” he says. “And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car, it’s the freedom from fear, it’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK.”

This philosophy can also double as a key to understanding the way in which the series is “tricking” the audience into buying what it is selling. Much can be made of the “symbolic” nature of the cigarette in this show, but it’s more than a symbol—it’s a tool used by the creators of the show to display how a product that is universally know to cause damage to your health can, in certain situations, seem benign, or even sexy. Rather than the unconscious desire to see these characters die with black lungs—which would be something akin to the death wish—the show sets up an aesthetic wherein cigarettes can be reborn as something refined, or at least accepted as a given. Those who watch the show and fall for the magic of the images are the same as those who are comforted by the jubilant spirit of the “It’s Toasted!” slogan. As they jump into the overwhelming and lush style that the series is filmed in, they are indeed victims of an elaborate meta-executed advertising scheme.

This is the start of many cross-textual instances of “advertising” within the realm of Mad Men. Through the show there will be, at various times: product placement within the show for a brand that wishes to affect the audience of the show; a successful ad campaign that reaches its logical end when one of Don’s family members succumbs to the copy he helped write; times when copywriters use their own real-life experiences to influence the way in which a product is marketed; and, times when a product on the show will appear again not during the programming, but during a commercial break.

There are two ways of looking at this. First, it could be said that, like any other television show that needs to recoup budgets and make a profit for its carrier, these instances of product placement and flashy ads are included in the Mad Men viewing experience so the network can suck money from companies desperate to appeal to the type of person who watches Mad Men. Thus, the network is depending on the viewer to, one, watch the ads (as opposed to downloading the show and eschewing the annoyance of the episode being broken up); two, pay attention to the ads enough that they will complete the conscious and unconscious acceptance of the message; and three, believe in what the ad is telling them enough to go and buy the product. This is, after all, exactly what the Sterling Cooper creative team is doing, so why should it be a surprise that TV advertisers today are doing anything differently?

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord frames this process as one that works because of the passivity of “society” toward the “spectacle,” the ambivalence toward the fact that they are being brainwashed. “The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned,” he writes. “Its sole message is: ‘What appears is good; what is good appears.’ The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply” (Debord 1). Debord is characterizing the average viewer of television and other forms of entertainment as victims of a machine. If he is to be believed, all this cross-level advertising is a malicious attempt to sucker the viewer into watching.

In his essay on Mad Men, however, Chuck Klosterman provides a begrudging acceptance of the ad campaigns that he admits have “worked” on him. In his brilliantly titled essay “It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened” (brilliant because it is taken from a speech Don gives to Peggy Olsen, secretary-turned-copywriter, when he tries to get her forget the birth of her child at the end of season one) he blames the consumer for over thinking the ads, and assuming they are aware of the “trick” at play, when really the “trick” is to get the potential customer to believe there is a “trick” at all, thereby forcing them to spend time thinking of the ad. “On Mad Men,” Klosterman writes, “Draper tries to create a soft reality—he tries to trick housewives into thinking that Heineken beer reflects something about their class that Budweiser does not. Draper knows this transference is a construction, but he knows how emotive construction works” (Klosterman 186).

Klosterman here is referring to “A Night To Remember,” Season Two Episode Eight, where Don and Duck Phillips, then the head of accounts, try to convince the Heineken people that their product will sell in suburban supermarkets if housewives believe it to be a upscale foreign beer. Later in the episode, when the two go to the Draper residence for dinner, Betty proudly shows off the Heineken she bought for the occasion, bragging to everyone that she has a beer from Holland. Don and Duck inform her that they designed the ad campaign, and Betty is disgusted at how easily she bought into their spin.

Klosterman then extends this altercation between Duck and Don and the shocked Betty to adapt it to the relationship between the way Mad Men presents the philosophy behind advertising, and the way the audience understands the way advertising works. The thought is that the audience is smart enough to avoid the “passivity” that Debord warns us of, but Klosterman warns us that even those who comprehend the way an ad is “working” its victims over are in danger of succumbing to its charm. “As the audience of Mad Men, we intellectually relate to [Draper’s] task,” he writes. We’re sophisticated enough to imagine how beer can be sold as a lifestyle. And this is because the central mission of advertising has succeeded completely. What used to be its seemingly preposterous scheme—selling an emotion or worldview through a disparate product—is now the actual, accepted motive behind why people buy things” (Klosterman 186). Klosterman is likening us to Betty Draper, and in doing that he’s not condescending to us—Klosterman himself admits to having subliminal knowledge of ad campaigns for this very reason—but rather he’s recognizing that the consumer internalizes how the advertiser makes the connection between a product (Heineken) and a random entity that stirs positive emotions in the viewer (European class and luxury). And to take this one step further, the entire operation takes place within the show, making it an example of product placement that occurs within the context of transparent, conventional advertising.

This “trick” that Klosterman speaks of shows up elsewhere in the Mad Men universe, even achieving another level of meta-advertising by appealing to viewers in a two-front manner: product placement for an item that is also being advertised—and advertised by using this “trick”—during the commercial breaks. It could be said that it’s a no-brainer for an upscale liquor company to advertise during Mad Men; the show already does its job to sell spirits, and it does so in the same manner that it embodies the spirit of advertising by becoming one (as I discussed earlier).

So it seems reasonable that Tanqueray, the gin brand owned by conglomerate Diageo, would want to advertise during an episode of Mad Men. The show features extensive amounts of gin drinking, usually done in upscale joints where the men sip their martinis in French cuffs as glamorous women wait on them. The Tanqueray brand has also been mentioned on the show in visibly and verbally; Duck Phillips receives a case of the iconic green bottles in his office in Season Two Episode 11, The Jet Set, and though he has given up drinking at the time, he begins to whittle away at his British liquor later in the season. But it’s a one-two punch: during commercial breaks at various points during season three, the Tanqueray brand advertised in 30-second commercial spots. These ads had true impact, and this impact comes from its tone, pacing, look, subject matter, and appearance of its actors: all of these elements of the ad have some relationship with the swank of the Mad Men sets.

The ad series, called “Resist Simple,” was produced by the Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency, which is best known for coining Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan as well as countless of advertising campaigns that have affected people even if they claim to never watch ads. The Tanqueray ads that ran during Mad Men’s third season were a part of this “Resist Simple” campaign, and even in their 30 seconds of allotted time they manage to fit in the allure of the exotic brand a la the Heineken campaign (the listing of berries and spices that are associated with enticing far-off places of renown), casual sex, and the promise of overindulging in stiff cocktails. There’s even a wonderfully pompous example of flippant affluence—as beautiful people sashay from ancient fresco to pricy bar the narrator informs you that people who drink Tanqueray are the kind of people “who can visit Paris repeatedly and still not manage to see the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa, or the Arc de Triomphe” (Tanqueray “Paris” ad). It’s a calculated way to “trick” the viewer into buying into the illusion of Tanqueray as the drink of fabulous uber-wealthy people in Paris, and, as Klosterman points out, it works—both on the show Mad Men and for its audience when the show goes to a commercial break.

Klosterman and Debord both have viable arguments about the way the advertising industry uses the powerful medium of television—though Klosterman has a distinct advantage because he’s been fortunate enough to see the show—but when these theories are directly applied to Mad Men, they have to be examined in a different way. Every instance that “advertising” appears, regardless of its form, Mad Men is upping the ante for how television shows can claim total dominance over their subject matter. Every product placement, every collaborative marketing plan to advertise the show itself—Mad Men suits from Banana Republic; Don and Betty-themed Barbies from Mattel; a viral marketing campaign that allowed Facebook and Twitter users to change their profile pictures to a “Mad Men’d” version of themselves; actors hired by AMC to dress in Mad Men attire and carry out a flash mob in New York’s Grand Central Station—is no different from every brilliant ad campaign Don comes up with on the show, or the emergence of Modernist advertising such as the Volkswagon “Lemon” ads, or every commercial that runs during the breaks when the show airs live (Shulman, The New Yorker). They all complement each other and intensify the show’s already ambitious goal. All these forms of advertising are the same, and they work in the same way. So why would one of these ads—say, Don pitching Lucky Strike—be considered entertainment, or fiction, and the Tanqueray ad considered crass manipulation, just because they ran at different junctures during the viewing experience of Mad Men? That would be contradictory, because it’s clear that these ads are identical, and both equally important to making Mad Men work as a show. And, yes, the show does work. It’s no wonder that the subject of television advertising has never been fully explored as source material for popular entertainment: it could only happen at this moment, when advertising has become so ubiquitous we have forgotten what the “trick” is, and on this medium, television, where the slick magic of the show is broken up by its real-life counterpart, a juxtaposition that makes Don Draper’s slight of hand just that much more powerful.

Photo image by the great Dyna Moe, used under a Creative Commons license.