Every week on AMC TV's Mad Men, the men and women at
Sterling Cooper create and design retro 1960s ad campaigns, all while obsessively chain-smoking, drinking and womanizing.
Looking for a little fact in the fiction of Mad Men,
Wired.com is asking some real-world ad executives to talk about the show’s realism and relevance to the advertising industry today. This week, we spoke with Jerry Della Femina, who has been working in and out of advertising since the early 1960s. Working with brands from Isuzu and Chemical Bank to Meow Mix and Pan Am, Della Femina started his own agency, Della Femina Travisano & Partners, in 1967 and according to him, went on to sell it three times, including "once when I didn't even own it."
Now chairman and CEO of Della Femina Rothschold Jeary and Partners, we asked Della Femina to talk about last week's season finale, discuss what Mad Men gets right (and wrong) about the era, and what we changes we can expect to see in the world of Mad Men next season.
Wired.com: In the season finale of Mad Men last week, Don Draper ends up going back to his wife and potentially leaving Sterling Cooper forever. Was that a surprise to you?
Jerry Della Femina: It’s interesting how much it ends like The Sopranos. Whether you’re a mafia guy or in advertising, you always end up going back to your family.
My wife said, “Isn’t that sad and emotional?" I said, “Oh, it’s bullshit.”
There’s one thing about the '50s and '60s. It was a time that destroyed livers and marriages. We drank too much, we smoked too much. We did it all too much. And in the end, everybody’s life changed. I only know two to three people that I grew up with in advertising in the 1960s who are married to the same women.
Wired.com: So I guess you’d say the womanizing, smoking and drinking on the show are pretty accurate to the times?
Della Femina: It’s as realistic as could be. People smoked all the time. In my agency, I was smoking about three to four packs of cigarettes a day.
In fact, there was an ashtray at the elevator with sand in it where people would put out their cigarettes. A client once came in from R.J. Reynolds and started going through the sand, looking for butts from competitors, to make sure we weren’t straying from the brand.
This was not a business where wealthy people would come in and say this is what I’m going to do. It was a business of the “have nots.” In the '50s and '60s, a family’s first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.
Wired.com: Were you a third child? If not, how did you get into advertising?
Della Femina: In those days, no one said, "I want to be an advertising person." I was a messenger and I went into it because I saw people with their feet up on the desk. Some of the people in that world made $60,000. I thought: “Somebody makes more than Joe DiMaggio?”
You sort of fall into this business, because it seems like a good way to make money. Then you fall in love with it.
I went to work in the mail room at the Chrysler building. We had 27 mail boys — this was their training program. Of the 27, we had three to four from Princeton, two from Harvard, two more from Yale, a couple of Dartmouth. None of them went into advertising. The only two that stayed were two poor kids from Brooklyn.
No wonder we were all so amazed to find ourselves at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Wired.com: How does Don Draper fit into that paradigm?
Della Femina: What I love about the Don Draper character is that he’s so real and filled with all these contradictions. In a way, he’s so amazed that he is where he is. There’s a little sense of wonder, that he’s not quite sure where he is. It’s seen as coldness, but I see it as, “Oh my god. This woman is taking me to bed... Oh my god, I’m in Palm Springs.”
Wired.com: Would it be possible for someone like Don Draper to succeed in advertising today?
Della Femina: Would he still be in the business? No, more scruffy people took over.
At that time, you had to look like Gregory Peck, and act like Gregory Peck, and be that sort of strong, silent type who just said the right word.
He’s playing Gregory Peck in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. He’s very quiet, and doesn’t talk. People say, “Wow.”
If I didn’t talk I’d get killed. I don’t look like Don Draper.
I’m always reminded of David Ogilvy, who once drank too much at lunch and to keep himself from throwing up in a meeting he kept nodding his head up and down. The client gave him the account, and they said: “Mr. Ogilvy was so smart, he just nodded his head, he really knew what was going on in the room.”
Wired.com: How has advertising changed since then?
Della Femina: Leo Burnett and David Ogilvy, they were creative guys of another era. They had these great reputations. But suddenly advertising became Italian and Jewish.
Burnett was a genius of that time. I remember after he died, I was pitching the Sony account. I pitched my heart out, and it looked like we were about to get it. But they called us and said “We’re going to give it to Leo Burnett. It was a tie, but then they showed us this film of the late Leo Burnett. And it was so great. We’re gonna go with them." I was shocked. I said, “You’d rather have a dead Leo Burnett than a live Jerry Della Femina?”
And it’s true. We got beaten by a dead man.
Wired.com: So did you end up outliving all those guys?
Della Femina: Well, eventually we got to the real creative revolution. People who they wouldn’t even allow in the place as messengers were suddenly taking over the creative.
All these agencies suddenly had to change the way they did business, because they were being beaten by these smaller agencies doing creative work.
Wired.com: How did you get involved with Saatchi & Saatchi?
Della Femina: I went to England to buy an agency. This was long before the British invasion. Because everyone thought I was a nut, I went there to buy a modicum of respectability. Someone told me there was a great little agency — Saatchi & Saatchi. Go see them. So I went to see Saatchi & Saatchi and they greeted me like a visiting king. They had read my book. I started talking to them about how I would buy them, and after the first 30 minutes I thought, “Gee. They’re very smart.”
The next half hour I thought, “Oh my God. They’re smarter than I am.” I spent the next half hour trying to make sure they didn’t buy everything I owned.
Wired.com: But you eventually did sell your agency, right?
Della Femina: Yeah. When I sold my agency, I remember telling my execs, “Sold is sold. Let’s not think we’ll be able to do whatever we wanted to do before.”
The Brits were coming in, because the dollar was weak. We were selling for 50 cent[s on the] dollar.
When The Wall Street Journal called me to ask why I sold it, I said I did it for the money. They thought it was funny. Nobody says that. Everyone was trying to fool themselves into thinking it would be good for them. But we didn’t have a choice, we sold to the highest bidder.
That’s what happened — Saatchi & Saatchi came in and bought every agency.
Wired.com: In this episode, Sterling Cooper gets sold to a British firm and Don and Duck have a fight over where the field is heading. Duck argues that "when the economy is good, people buy things. And when it's bad they don't. There's no reason for us to be tied to creative's fantasies of persuasion." Then Don said "I sell products, not advertising," and stormed out. Who was right?
Della Femina: There's an eternal war between a creative person and the business person. Everyone in advertising has had and lost those arguments. It was pretty accurate.
Don was able to be brave there because he didn’t have a contract. If he had a contract he would have probably folded.
Wired.com: So what do we have to look forward to in the next season?
Della Femina: Well, the show’s timeline has always been a little late. Now they’re going to have to contend with people smoking grass in the office and people doing cocaine on restaurant tables.
In the 1970s, advertising suddenly became a hot, interesting business, because people started talking about the creative. Suddenly they’re seeing funny commercials, vignettes that made them laugh — suddenly advertising was hot.
They’ve got to show that. It’s going to get looser. Wait until they put Don Draper in tie-dyed jeans. I’m looking forward to seeing him with love beads and tie-dyed jeans.
