Everybody's looking for a piece of this Mad world

MEDIA & MARKETING:DON'S BACK, and so are all the people making money off Don's back.

The return of Mad Men to US television on Sunday – and a tantalising two days later in this part of the world – is being accompanied by a flurry of commercial activity that both Don Draper and protege Peggy Olson would probably agree is, well, a bit naff.

Leading the charge, Newsweek, edited by magazine doyenne Tina Brown, is publishing a special Mad Men edition, filling its pages with archive 1960s ads revived by brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Johnnie Walker and, er, Spam that were around back then – with the addition of an odd URL or a “please drink responsibly” message. “Welcome back to 1965,” the blurb says in old-school font.

Back in 2012, Mad Men’s return to our screens has been delayed a full eight months as a result of prosaic commercial matters that have little of the glamour of, say, an obstreperous Roger Sterling mixing himself a mid-morning vodka martini. Essentially, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was unhappy that television network AMC’s opening position in his contract renegotiations included a two-minute cut in the show’s running time to make way for more ads, a downsizing of the cast to save on costs and a boost in its levels of product placement.

It seemed that AMC, a small network that built its reputation on Mad Men, had got greedy and, arguably, disloyal to Weiner in a manner that would never be tolerated at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Weiner fought and won. “We got this far this way,” he told the New York Times. “Why would you change the brand? It reeked of New Coke to me.”

Though not against product placement per se, Weiner has insisted that the number of paid-for product placements in the show can be counted on one hand and that brand names are prominent within its story arcs purely for the sake of narrative realism.

The question is, however, somewhat hazy in a way that wouldn’t be permitted under Irish and British rules on the practice, which require copious audience alerts whenever money has changed hands.

These considerations seem glaringly crass when placed side-by-side with such a comprehensively vintage, elegantly scripted product like Mad Men. Indeed, BSkyB’s plucking of the show from the BBC means that season five is the first to be broadcast in Britain with commercial breaks – the brashness of which inevitably threatens to disrupt viewers’ immersion in a stylised past of tufted sofas and mahogany-walled elevators.

Recognising long before Newsweek the value of aligning its brand with the show, consumer goods company Unilever made a series of retro-styled ads to coincide with the fourth season. The vignettes closely mimicked Mad Men’s production design, which Unilever declared was about celebrating its heritage and chiming with consumer cravings for nostalgia, but was also a very 21st-century tactic intended to fool viewers who forward through personal video recorder playbacks into thinking that the ad breaks were over already. Surprise! They’re not.

Having bought up Mad Men’s fifth season in 2010, BSkyB is finally running teasers for the double episode scheduled on Sky Atlantic for Tuesday. The channel is only available to Sky subscribers, of which there are 675,000-plus in Ireland. As a UPC customer (there are 380,000 of us), this is a sore point. And as someone who grew up in the 1980s, when the Sky television brand was chiefly associated with repeats of Family Ties and Eight is Enough, its first-run import frenzy has been astonishing to watch – or not watch.

It’s all part of the modus operandi of News Corp, BSkyB’s 39 per cent shareholder, as Hacked Off campaigner and journalism professor Brian Cathcart described it to a Dublin media conference in January. Anything that’s vaguely popular – and Mad Men is no more than that – is a target for poaching: “It’s only a matter of time before Julian Fellowes is made an offer he can’t refuse.”

Mad Men’s most bottom-line-focused character, Pete Campbell, would doubtless approve of such a strategy, leaving it to Bert Cooper to ruminate in his socks about losing clients to bigger agencies.

Cooper’s cantankerous cameos are, incidentally, just another reason – alongside Draper’s genius, Peggy’s frustration and various clients’ dim-wittedness – why the present-day advertising industry can’t help loving its portrayal in Mad Men, even if it’s also sick of the constant references to it, and even if it’s an otherwise unrecognisable world of sashaying secretaries, pencil-strewn art departments and people taking power naps that aren’t even called power naps.

As for the nostalgia, well that’s far more prevalent in the tie-ins than it is in the change-fixated drama itself. Don Draper in 2012 would probably be far too “big picture” a thinker to orchestrate Newsweek’s gimmick a full five years after Mad Men first began. It’s probably best not to dwell on the possibility that his contemporary equivalent is some kind of social-media guru with an Instagram fetish.