Do you hear that?
It’s the sound of silence. Now that Mad Men is over for good, devoted fans across the country are scratching their heads, thinking about what to do next.
Start (re)watching from the beginning? Set about to ranking the best episodes of all time? Sit around thinking about the significance of the final scene that finds Don Draper blissed out alongside his om-chanting, fellow yogis?
You could argue that Don, with that final, satisfying grin, experienced some sort of personal awakening. But, let’s be honest: It’s more likely he reached a state of advertising nirvana by figuring out how to sell Coca-Cola to (literally) everyone in the world.
Because, any way you slice it, Don is – and forever will be – an adman.
But the times, they have a-changed from the advertising world of the 1960’s to today’s rapidly-evolving digital marketing landscape. Can you imagine Don syncing his iPhone with his Apple Watch? Yeah, I can’t either.
And even if you haven't watched Man Men yet, there are lessons to be learned for you too - mainly get on Netflix and watch Mad Men!
What advice would Don Draper have for today’s content marketers?
If Don Draper were around (and *cough* real) to see the year 2015, what advice would he have for marketers looking for the right message to sell products and services to their customers?
Let’s take a look:
Put the past behind you and focus on the future
If there’s anyone who embodies the mantra “what happened in the past stays in the past,” it’s Don Draper. This is a man who inadvertently killed his own commanding officer in Korea, and knowingly stole his identity to escape his own troubled past and carve out a new life for the future.
The lesson for content marketers?
If something isn’t working, scrap it and start over again.
This isn’t to say that you can expect overnight results with your content marketing campaigns, however. On the contrary, developing and refining a successful content campaign takes time, effort, persistence, and patience – not to mention a willingness to creatively approach challenges as they arise.
The key is to look ahead, continually reevaluating and refocusing content strategies either when campaigns don’t perform as well as expected or to shore up fresh ideas to keep readers engaged.
If you’re falling behind on website traffic goals you might, for example, try targeting some new/different keyword variations to bump up rankings a position or two. Or you might want to revisit keyword strategy to uncover the questions searchers are asking in an effort to provide useful, relevant content to readers.
“This industry is full of ups and downs,” my colleague Casie Gillette notes in a Search Engine Land article, “[but] we must always be pushing ahead. Don’t be afraid to revamp the campaign and try again, or start something completely new. Just be sure to keep in mind the lessons you learned from your failed campaigns.”
“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation”
This has to be one of my favorite Don Draper-isms. It’s basically his philosophy throughout the entire series, which he uses to both win over clients and to address his complicated personal life.
And why shouldn’t it have been? Wasn’t the entire point of advertising in the 1960’s to sell the so-called American dream?
Take Don’s pitch to Kodak, for example. Never mind that he’s veering perilously close to divorce and estranged from his children. The images reflected in the slide projector show a happy family – a beautiful wife and two smiling kids – which represent a fantasy, a dream that somehow becomes reachable with what Don calls the “time machine.”
In today’s crowded digital marketing landscape, such an approach wouldn’t be half as effective, however. Why? Because, with 58.7 million new blog posts each month (on just WordPress alone!), chances are the Carousel pitch would have already been used. Many times over.
To cut through the online noise and stand out in a way that’s lasting and memorable, you need to make sure you’re developing content that’s useful, relevant and different from what’s already out there.
This doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch every time – often, it can be worth revisiting older strategies from a new angle or even updating content that’s already been produced. The trick is to find that unique message, style, or tone that sets you apart from the competition.
Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness
There are dozens of examples of this theory playing out over the course of the Mad Men, but the most poignant, in my mind, involves the Hershey’s pitch.
It’s less about the fact that Don cuts off the syrupy sweet depiction of his father rewarding him for mowing the lawn with a chocolate bar (“Hershey’s is the currency of affection”) and admits he grew up in a whorehouse – and more about the fact that eating a Hershey’s bar made him feel like a normal, happy kid.
Because, as Mad Men reminds us time and time again, advertising is based on pure, unadulterated happiness.
During a session at Skyword’s recent brand storytelling conference, Ian Fitzpatrick, chief strategy officer at Almighty, talked about how important it is for you to understand what you’re interrupting when you invite a reader to consume a piece of your content.
After all, attention is displacement from doing the things consumers love (time spent with family, a workout at the gym, a night out with friends, etc.), so it’s up to you to figure out how your content can help readers get back to doing the things they love.
Don Draper did it with a Kodak slide projector advertised as a “portable nostalgia generator.” But even the most seemingly mundane content topics (i.e., “How to Change a Car Tire”) can resonate with readers looking for quick, easy answers to their problems so they can get back to whatever it is they really want to be doing.
Final Thoughts
So, okay. Maybe it’s not so easy to picture Mad Men’s creative mastermind balancing on a yoga ball in a shared workspace as he clicks away on his MacBook Pro. (I prefer to continue thinking of him reclined on his corner office couch with an Old Fashioned in hand.)
But one thing’s for sure – Don Draper sure knew advertising. By following him on his journey, the ups and downs, successes and failures, we have learned to apply those same basic principles to our content marketing.
What advice do you think Don Draper would have for today’s content marketers? How do you think he would function in contemporary digital society?
