Mad Men and the Power of Storytelling
Storytelling is the most ancient form of both entertainment and history. The oral tradition has handed down fables for generations that stand in for history, tell the story of peoples, and create the archetypes of heroes. In his book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell described how across all cultures in the world there was a version of the “Hero’s Journey.” An underdog must undertake a great task, through completion of this journey find self discovery, and return home as the hero of one’s people.
The television series Mad Men follows the epic self-destruction of a 1960’s advertising executive. The seven-season show is tragic, and while the main character Don Draper is deeply flawed, he is also a brilliant advertising creative. My favorite scene in the series is a pitch Don makes for a Kodak slide machine, featuring a wheel of slides. He begins the pitch by describing that most advertising relies on the fact that a product is new, that people are driven to have the next, novel thing. Then he moves on and begins to talk about other human needs. He displays slides from better times in his own life and marriage, and speaks to the need for love and safety. Unspoken is the implication that these are things that no longer exist for him. He describes the slide machine as a time machine that will ultimately bring you home safely - and coins the term “carousel.”
The pitch is based on nostalgia, at once sad, happy, sweet, and bitter. By channeling his own feelings, he is able to connect to the common human emotions of the other people in the room. It creates a bond through this very short journey of shared experience. It is so powerful that we forget that this is a commercial pitch to sell an ad campaign, for a product that will be sold to the public.
Mad Men was a modern American epic, over 75 hours long, following a kind of anti-hero through a period of post-war U.S. commercial dominance, where ultimately our hero is cast out as a middle aged man into the uncertain 1960’s and a time built for youth. The Kodak pitch scene is a short funeral for the main character’s nuclear family, his personal American dream.
The scene also captures a revolution in advertising and how we relate to products. It captures the shift from selling the utility or novelty of a product to the selling of the identities of the consumer themselves. The carousel pitch was focused on the consumer, not the product. Much of the modern advertising that we are currently exposed to does just this. It asks us to consider ourselves as the type of person that the brand represents. Nike’s “Just do it” campaign asked us to consider ourselves as people that are intrinsically motivated and action oriented. Even if we are not, we are able to purchase $100 talismans for our feet so that we can feel like people who can “Just do it.” While describing this shift during his pitch, Draper is also helping to tell the story of consumerism in America.
For me, this scene demonstrates the power of storytelling as a public speaker. It captures how much more engaging it is to shift one’s approach to be more human focused. Being vulnerable in a presentation is of course a risk, and must be done with caution and skill. Draper’s pitch could have been a disaster - too much emotion and the spell would have been broken, it would have been too personal. If his pain was too close to the surface, he would have made the audience uncomfortable. Not enough emotion, and the pitch would not have felt authentic.
The story is, for this very reason, the ultimate vehicle for conveying humanity. Because humans have been telling stories since the beginning of time, there is a structure that we are all familiar with. The structure of stories creates a container for human emotion to be delivered in a way that people are comfortable receiving. It allows for things to become human without becoming overly personal. When Don Draper presents his pitch, he uses his private pictures of his marriage, but he uses the pronoun “us.” He knows that the desire for love and safety, and the wish for better times are universal, and that his story of heartbreak is, in fact, one of the stories of our people. Here is the clip, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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