Copywriting Takeaways from TV’s ‘Mad Men’

<img src="https://copywriterspodcast.com/images/banner/copywriterspodcast213.jpg" /> <br />Among those of us who watch cable television, everyone’s favorite copywriter bad boy is Don Draper of the show ‘Mad Men.’<br /> Along with his secretary who became a copywriter, Peggy Olson, Don Draper is the reason this is the first edition of the Fictional Old Masters Series.<br /> Yes, they are fictional characters. But a lot of factual research went into creating these characters, And I was able to pluck out a few gems from the hours and hours of dialogue they spoke on the show.<br /> My goal today is to make this useful as well as maybe a little entertaining.<br /> So to talk about ‘Mad Men,’ we really have to begin with Matt Weiner. The show was his brainchild.<br /> Now Weiner was not an ad man, much less a Mad Man. In fact, he was a cable TV drama writer. He wrote the pilot for ‘Mad Men,’ on spec, in 1999.<br /> David Chase, who was doing ‘The Sopranos’ for HBO at the time, was so impressed with the script that he hired Weiner to write and executive produce that show. Weiner joined ‘The Sopranos’ team and had a lot of success.<br /> Eight years later, in 2007, Weiner got his show with ‘Mad Men.’ The first episode launched six weeks after the last episode of ‘The Sopranos,’ but on a different cable network, AMC.<br /> ‘Mad Men’ won tons of awards, and continued to 2015.<br /> I bring up all this history because it leads to an important question: Consider it was fiction, how authentic was Mad Men, compared to real Madison Avenue advertising?<br /> To answer that question, let’s turn to the acclaimed high-drama film producer Alfred Hitchcock. Weiner has said that Hitchcock was a major influence on him.<br /> And Hitchcock was a much stronger believer in facts that most people would expect. In the 1967 book ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut,’ Hitchcock muses, “What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.”<br /> So he was pretty much saying drama should be close to real life. But not like real life, because drama s