AD NAUSEUM: AMC’s Mad Men is far from the highest-rated show on TV, but it’s become something of a pivotal one for its producers, its network, and the TV industry in general, according to a story in Advertising Age magazine. Set in New York’s Madison Avenue ad business in the early ‘60s, the show was AMC’s first foray into producing its own dramatic content, and it debuted this summer to respectable numbers that dropped to nearly half near the end of the first season run. This is where things get interesting.
DirecTV has bought the rights to sponsor the Oct. 18 season finale, which will run commercial-free, but with a specially-designed opening that credits the satellite provider, and immediately afterwards AMC has scheduled a mini-documentary on the show’s wrap party, also sponsored by DirecTV. It’s a step in the right direction, according to the show’s creators, who told Ad Age that they’re hoping the next season will see Mad Men go entirely commercial-free.
How, you may ask, did a show set in the golden age of the advertising industry become so inherently hostile to advertising, and why would anyone with an office and a paycheque wrapped up in the show consider that a good thing? Despite a deal with Jack Daniel’s whiskey, attempts to integrate product placement into the show have been unsuccessful, which cost Radical CEO, the show’s original commercial producers, to lose their contract. Mad Men was a hard sell, it seems, thanks to the show’s adult themes and situations, which made potential sponsors balk.
Even Jack Daniel’s imposed strict rules on how it could be featured on the hard-drinking show. “They don’t want to see people driving,” said Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. “They don’t want to see people hitting each other. They don’t want to see people fighting. They do not want to see people having sex immediately after drinking. You’re sort of like, ‘What is the purpose of Jack Daniels if there’s no sex after it and there’s no fighting after it?’”
Weiner himself has been publicly dismissive of most product placement, which he called “insulting.” What complicates the pitch even more is that Mad Men is a show whose uniquely educated, affluent audience also tends to delay viewing it in unprecedented numbers, on TiVo and other personal video recorders. This means that ads, some of them time sensitive, can be easily skipped. The result is an overall sponsorship like DirecTV’s, which hearkens back to the early days of television that were just ending during the period when Mad Men is set, and shows like the Texaco Star Theater, the Colgate Comedy Hour and the Kraft Music Hall.
“Given the landscape, TV is very likely to return to that single-sponsor model,” said Kevin Beggs, president-production and programming for Lionsgate Television, who took over financing Mad Men early in the season. And so, digitally enhanced, we accelerate into the past.
