1. Competitors and Clients

      “Oh, you mean love. You mean the big lightning bolt to the heart where you can’t eat and you can’t work and you just run off and get married and have babies. The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”

       —Don Draper to Rachel Menken, Season 1, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

      Madison Avenue, which runs from Madison Square Park at 23^rd Street to the Madison Avenue Bridge at 138^th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, has become synonymous with the advertising industry in the United States. Both the park and the avenue are named for James Madison, the fourth U.S. president. Madison Avenue’s association with advertising began in the 1920s, when the industry experienced tremendous growth. Yet, advertising as a business has existed in New York City since long before that: there were twenty agencies based there as early as 1861.

      “Madison Avenue” was first used as a term to refer to the ad industry in 1923, and although the association between the area and the business remains, many large agencies have migrated to other areas of the city due to the rising costs of office space on the East Side. In the 1950s, however, it was widely accepted wisdom that any agency that wanted to achieve success would set up shop on Madison. Thus, it made perfect sense for series creator Matthew Weiner to place his fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency there. (The term “mad men” is a contraction of “Madison Avenue ad men.”)

      Sharp-eyed Mad Men viewers may have noticed that the Sterling Cooper offices have a real-world address: 405 Madison Avenue. Although it is tempting to make this the first stop on a Mad Men city tour, those who do may be disappointed to find that there is no office building at this location, just a bank of ATMs. (A visit to a cash machine might be a good idea for a first stop on a Mad Men tour.)

      McCann-Erickson

      Many of the great advertising giants of New York are referenced, and in some cases play significant roles, in the storyline of Mad Men. Perhaps the most noteworthy is McCann-Erickson, a huge, international firm in the 1960s and even larger today. In the Season 1 episode “Shoot,” McCann makes a play to recruit Don away from Sterling Cooper using a revived modeling career for Betty in one of its campaigns as leverage. Don turns McCann down, strengthening his position at Sterling Cooper in the process, but the larger firm is heard from again in a major way in Season 3: in that season’s finale, it is revealed that McCann-Erickson has bought out Putnam, Powell & Lowe, the fictional British firm that bought out Sterling Cooper. This event precipitates the major status quo change that sets up Season 4. Rather than work for the corporate giant that he memorably refers to as a “sausage factory,” Don convinces Bert Cooper and Roger Sterling, along with their British associate Lane Pryce, to resign from the company and start a new one. Season 3 ends with the establishment of the new firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

      The headquarters of the real McCann-Erickson, today part of a global giant called McCann Worldgroup, are at 622 3^rd Avenue at 40^th Street. The agency’s history stretches back to 1902, when a department store ad manager named Alfred Erickson started his own agency, representing clients like Bon Ami cleanser and Fiat cars. In 1912, H. K. McCann founded the H. K. McCann Company with four partners; Standard Oil and Cheesebrough, makers of Vaseline petroleum jelly, were clients. The firms merged in 1930; by this point, McCann had opened offices in Paris, Berlin, and London. Indeed, McCann-Erickson had an international presence when Don Draper would have been in diapers.

      McCann-Erickson developed some of the most effective and memorable ad campaigns of the twentieth century. In 1972, its campaign for Coca-Cola, using the catchy tune, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” was a worldwide phenomenon. It also introduced the famous jingle for “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat.” It continues to create popular campaigns today, like the U.S. Army’s “Army Strong” spots and the series of “priceless” commercials for Mastercard.

      Despite their treatment as the “villains” in the storyline, McCann-Erickson seemed to appreciate its role in TV’s only show about the advertising business. It ran ads in the November 16, 2009, editions of industry publications Adweek, Brandweek, and Mediaweek shortly after the airing of the Season 3 finale, proclaiming “Welcome, Sterling Cooper—Your friends at McCann-Erickson.”

      Grey Advertising

      The other large, real-life firm that plays a major role in Season 3 is Grey Advertising, today called Grey Global Group, now headquartered on 200 5^th Avenue. In the wake of his ouster from Sterling Cooper after arranging the Putnam, Powell & Lowe takeover and subsequently failing to install himself as president, Duck Phillips (Mark Moses) finds a new position at Grey. There, he schemes to poach Peggy and Pete from Sterling Cooper and begins an affair with Peggy that continues through the end of Season 3.

      Duck, and the Mad Men writers, could scarcely have found a better company with which to tempt two promising young ad talents in the early 1960s. Grey was founded in 1917 by Larry Valkenstein and Arthur Fatt as Grey Studios, a direct-marketing company. Its name was allegedly derived from the color of the walls in its original shop. It became an advertising agency in 1925. (According to Duck, the décor remained drab for some time; he describes the offices as looking like “a Penn Station toilet with Venetian blinds.”) In 1956, Grey landed one of the major accounts of its day, Procter & Gamble, and embarked on a period of impressive growth throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Some of its most well-known campaigns are Greyhound’s “Leave the Driving to Us,” and its current clients include Canon, 3M, Nokia, Volkswagen, CocaCola, Campbell’s Soup, the National Football League, and the beverage giant Diageo.

      Doyle Dane Bernbach

      Which of the real-world ad agencies most closely resembles Sterling Cooper itself? One inspiration for the fictional agency is Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), today known as DDB Needham Worldwide. DDB is mentioned most often as Sterling Cooper’s rival for accounts both real and fictional, and the parallels between the two agencies are many. The reallife firm was established in 1949 and named after founders James Edwin Doyle, Maxwell Dane, and Bill Bernbach. Bernbach and Doyle met while working at Grey; Dane had owned his own small firm. Although a successful company with some big-money accounts, Sterling Cooper is often portrayed as a young, small firm in a David-vs.-Goliath relationship with giants like Grey and McCann-Erickson.