mad men reading list

It's a soggy Saturday where I am (Northwest CT) making it an excellent day to do what you never have time for anymore: reading longform. For Mad Men fans, I've compiled a list of books that memorialize those who fought in the Advertising Wars:

Jerry Della Femina's seminal ad memoir "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor" was first published in 1970 and made the ad business sound so enticing it inspired me (and many others) to go into it.

Yes, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a film but the novel is better imho, even without Gregory Peck's moving performance. Great writing, complex portrait of Mad Men-era office life and satisfying exploration of surprisingly contemporary theme of relative values of family vs. career.

And speaking of novels that are (way) better than films adapted from them, Revolutionary Road tells a dark story in Yates' stellar prose, the tale of a couple who buy into the American Dream of the 1960s and how it all unravels for them. She's a homemaker (of course) and he's got a thankless job in the ad industry (oxymoron?) The book resonates with vivid Mad Men-esque scenes like the one in a hospital waiting room, where everyone is smoking cigarettes.

Joshua Ferris was a copywriter in a cubicle in Chicago which gave him the chops to write a hilarious fictional sendup of the business Then We Came to the End. I defy anyone in advertising to read this without laughing. Out loud. Like I did. On a subway. So loud, the person next to you gives up the seat.

If there is a real-life Peggy Olson, it's Jane Maas who started at Ogilvy in 1964 and rose to be creative director and agency officer. With good-humor, wit and convincing detail, Mad Women tells the story of what it took to break into the mad men's club with award-winning work like the "I Love NY" campaign while raising two daughters you want to grow up to be normal.


I was freelancing at McCann when ECD Nina DiSesa's book came out and corridors were abuzz with alternating takes on the book: "It's brilliant!" "It's slander!" "It's her swan song before getting out of the business!"I immensely enjoyed Seducing the Boys Club which is not only the well-told story of how DiSesa herself ceiling-crashed to the top, it's advice to women in her wake on how to "Lean In" and grab those titles and agency stock-options.

I worked down the hall from John Kenney at Ogilvy and have long admired his writing, not just his elegant copywriter prose, but his humor pieces in the New York Times and the New Yorker which are LOL-funny. So is Truth in Advertising, a new satire on the business, which is alternately sweet and sad and hilariously on target. Gwyneth Paltrow doing a diapers commercial that has to stop filming because the baby cast to be hers turns out to be black? Only a veteran of the business could come up with that.

What are the odds that two ex-copywriters from Ogilvy would come out with a novel set in advertising, at the same time? From the same publisher? Another debut novel from Simon and Schuster this season is my own: Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue. It's a coming-of-middle age story about a woman and a business (advertising, of course.) It’s sort of like Mad Men thirty years later, from the point of view of an older, wiser, married Peggy Olson. One of the themes explored is technology, and the book offers readers opportunities to further explore characters in a digitally enhanced epilogue. Advertising, meet Transmedia. (Hey, where better to peddle your wares than on your own blog?)

Happy reading!

७ sins

I’ve been learning a lot from Nina DiSesa lately, thanks to her excellent book Seducing the Boys Club. I recommend it highly to anyone in the business who’s of the female persuasion. And to guys who find that they’re not in the club. (As we all know, it takes more than testicles to get in.)

One of her insights: there are Seven Deadly Sins to avoid when working with alpha men, traits that will convince them that you’re not worth dealing with.
Humility
Timidity
Cowardice
Submissiveness
Blind Obedience
Visible Fear
Hypersensitivity

thank you, Nina DiSesa

for having the cojones to say in Adweek what's been said in the women's loo for decades. Of course, unlike the rest of us, you'll never need another job in the business.

While watching Mad Men last year, I was struck by how precisely this brilliantly produced series captured the world of New York advertising as it must have been in 1962, and I was thankful that I didn't work in advertising back then.

I started as a copywriter in 1973, and shortly after that I was working successfully on an automotive additive business for a full year. I was asked off the business when the client discovered I was a woman.

Fast-forward to 1983 when I started at Y&R in New York —eerily similar to the Mad world of 1962—where the going gag was that a woman would never be group creative director, the second most powerful position there, unless she could pee standing up.

It's 2008. How are we doing?

How many women are creative directors in the large New York agencies?

How many women are running advertising agencies that don't have their name on the door?

How many women have P&L responsibilities that indicate real control and authority?

Although I have led creative departments at two agencies (JWT, Chicago, and McCann Erickson, New York), advertising is still by and large a boys club. And I think the few women who hold top positions along with me will agree. It's still big news when a woman is given the top job in our industry. Women in charge at boys clubs are still an anomaly. And it's not just the case in advertising. Forty years after women burned their bras to liberate their sex, only 2 percent of the Fortune 1000 CEOs are women. Two percent!

What are we doing wrong?

First of all, it's not a level playing field, and we need to get over that. Stop complaining about it, stop getting irate and do something about it. And for God's sake, don't bash men.

I have noticed that the women who make it in these boys clubs have a few things in common. The main thing is that almost all of us were promoted and supported by men. The men we worked for and with felt comfortable around us. We learned to adopt some of the male traits that make men so successful, and in doing so, we reminded the men of the thing they admire most: themselves.

Throughout my career I have tried to help women get more in touch with their male sides by being more decisive, focused, competitive and shrewd about asking for what they want and expecting what they deserve. At the same time, we need to exploit our uniquely female traits like compassion, collaboration, intuition and empathy—things a man simply doesn't want to learn.

It's a fine line we women walk when we are trying to become players in the boys clubs. If we are too girly-girly, the men won't relax around us and they will treat us like women. I hate when that happens.

I knew I was in trouble back in 1973 when I met that automotive client for the first time. He needed some copy changed ASAP, so I was introduced to him and fixed his ad while he watched—kind of like when AAA comes to change a tire. He was very polite to me, and that was the kiss of death. With the men he was always rowdy, crude and raucous.

At the same time, we can't become just like the men: We know what those women are like.

We have amazing powers as women. If we're smart and use our powers without malice, we can seduce and manipulate the men in our lives to earn their affection and even their respect.

There is an art to seduction and manipulation. I think I always knew this, but the notion crystallized for me during my first marriage to an out-of-work Sicilian actor who felt it was unmanly to help with household chores. So I worked at a full-time job, then did the shopping, cooked the meals and cleaned the apartment.

One day I bought a super heavy-duty vacuum cleaner, and after a few days I told my husband I was returning it. It was just too heavy for me to manage, I said. I wasn't strong enough to push it around. "I can do it," he boasted, and for the duration of our marriage he did all the vacuuming. My strategy had worked.

The skillful use of benevolent manipulation—where everybody wins—works wonders at work, too. I use the vacuum-cleaner strategy all the time. I play on men's masculine pride and their natural instincts to protect the "weaker" sex.

I can't figure this out and I'm exhausted," I will say to one of the men.

"And if it's not done by tomorrow, I'm dead."

"I'll do it," he'll invariably say.

But his rescue mission isn't as satisfying to him unless I appreciate the sacrifice he is making on my behalf.

This is as crucial as saying "thank you."

"No, no, you're swamped, too," I say.

"I'll make the time for it."

"Thank you. I love you."

"I know."

"You're welcome."

It's like great sex. Everyone walks away feeling fulfilled.

Now, I know that a lot of women will object to the notion of using seduction and manipulation in the workplace.

"Why should we stoop to conquer?" they ask. "We're smart, we're educated, and we work as hard as the men."

That's not enough. We've been doing that for years, and where has it gotten us? In most boys clubs there are token women, just enough of us in enough positions to prove that the old boy network is enlightened.

We've been playing by everyone else's rules long enough. It's time to screw the rules and make up your own. Take it from a woman who has been in advertising for 35 years: The most dramatic change in advertising since 1962 is that most of us have stopped smoking.

Nina DiSesa is chairman (not chairperson?) of McCann Erickson, New York.

[via adweek]