Marketing lessons from the most underestimated operator in Mad Men – with a detour through a 1960 television studio and a green cartoon owl. EVERYBODY QUOTES DON. NOBODY BILLS LIKE JOAN. Don Draper gets the mug, the poster, and the LinkedIn carousel. Fine – he was a spectacular closer. But he was a spectacular closer…
Five marketing lessons from the most punchable man on Madison Avenue – and one very expensive lesson about all-nighters. Nobody wants to be Pete Campbell. That is more or less the point of him. Matthew Weiner built the character to be irritating on contact: the voice, the hairline that recedes like a punishment for something…
And what Really Happens After Somebody Buys Your Agency, Your Newspaper, or Your Doctor Everybody remembers Don Draper. He gets the pitch, the carousel, the cheekbones. Watch Mad Men a second time – and if you work in marketing, you will – and the character quietly right about almost everything is the old man in…
Why mention rate became the vanity metric of AI search, and the one column that fixes it In 1985, a PR firm would mail you a bound book of press clippings and bill you by the thickness. Nobody read the clippings. The book proved you existed in print, which felt like proof of something bigger,…
Everybody remembers Don Draper. Nobody quotes the accountant. That is the mistake. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce had exactly one partner who understood where the money came from, where it went, and what it cost to keep the lights on, and he was the Englishman down the hall with the stiff collar and the terrible timing.…
Seven marketing lessons from the smoothest man on Madison Avenue – and what ignoring them cost real companies between 1965 and last Tuesday. There is a moment in season four of Mad Men when Bert Cooper – a man who is roughly nine hundred years old and has not worn shoes at the office in…
Seven lessons from Sterling Cooper, stress-tested against linear TV’s collapse, the $32-billion creator economy, and an algorithm that does not care how clever you think you are. The Secretary Who Outlasted the Medium Peggy Olson walks into Sterling Cooper in the first episode of Mad Men as Don Draper’s secretary. She walks into McCann-Erickson in…