Prompted Blog Post #10: Recognizing Truth

When the idea of marketing comes across the mind of someone who is generally uneducated on the subject, one of the first things that they think of might be the popular television show Mad Men. The show tells the story of an advertising agency in 1960's New York City. Although some of the representations of the field are truthful, especially for the time it is based in, the show is not a very accurate representation of what working at an advertising agency is like today. One example of this is a scene from the show where Don Draper, the main character and creative director at the agency, gives a marketing pitch to a client while obviously drunk.

Clearly, Draper is not the only one who has been drinking in this scene. The clients who he is pitching the idea to are also drinking. Obviously, whether or not it ever was, the consumption of alcohol is not something that occurs on an average day at an advertising agency. This may have been normal in the 1960's, when smoking in an office was also completely normal, but neither of these things are true today. If a worker was caught drinking on the job at an advertising agency, or any other job for that matter, they would probably be fired.

Mad Men represents a time where the field of marketing, specifically advertising, was changing and growing enormously. For this reason, the field is depicted in a very flashy manner compared to its reality, much like stock brokers are in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. The way the field of marketing is depicted in Mad Men definitely attracts viewers, but it misrepresents the field when it comes to modern professionalism and day-to-day operations.

- Paul Gielow

Sources:

- MrHenrypez. "Life Cereal 3." YouTube. YouTube, 05 Jan. 2013. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTsRa81Nt-8

- "About." AMC. AMC, n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
http://www.amc.com/shows/mad-men/exclusives/about

- Hetterly, Jonathan. "Mad Men Highs and Lows." Shrink Tank. N.p., 18 May 2015. Web. 10 Apr. 

2016.

          http://www.shrinktank.com/15-for-15-mad-men-highs-and-lows/