Amph [MAD MEN] Guy walks into an advertising agency...

I took a break after season 4, to let things settle, but I will start again very soon.

 

i was thinking upon rewatch of the last episode a year or two ago, the only way we know that they're supposed to be in California is one scene at a pool.

 

What did you think of The Suitcase? Many consider it the show's best episode.

 

It was brilliant, and I was particularly moved since Anna Draper is my favorite character. I'm not sure about Peggy's boyfriend though. I guess his behaviour can be considered selfish in some way, or maybe it was just indicative of how little he understands Peggy, and the irrelevance of their relationship serves as contrapposition with respect to the one between Peggy and Don, who create a sort of more intimate (even though non-romantic) bond.

 

Alright, I've started with 5.
Two quick priceless things in the first episode:

1) The face of Pete when he finds Roger talking with his potential clients


2) Pete's wife talking with Peggy's boyfriend:

"Things are not going well. There have been three riots in a week"

"Oh, that's terrible! And there's not much the police can do"

 

I've watched three more episodes.
The first one was about Lane and Pete. Lane appears to be dissastisfied with his job. He feels useless. This aspect felt a bit new to me since in the previous seasons he seemed to be an important member of the team. I loved when he tries to kiss Joan and she simply opens the door and then continues the conversation.
Then there is Pete, who looks miserable for completely different reasons. He is accomplished, but he starts realizing his vulnerabilities. At the driving license course he sees a younger and more appealing man seducing the teenager with whom he was flirting, then he has to face his sense of inadequacy when Don fixes his tap, finally he gets knocked down by Lane. I will never be a fan of Pete. He is too focused on himself to realize how many beautiful things he has.

In the second one the main topic was the life of couples. We have Peggy having a little crisis with her boyfriend because she is too much into her work and he feels like he's been left apart, Roger trying LSD with his wife and Don having the biggest argument with Megan so far. I am not sure yet whether I fully understand their dynamics. Of course they love each other, at the point that Don is neglecting his job, which is something nobody would have ever imagined. I am not sure what was his dream of having sex and killing the other woman about. Megan, on the other hand, would like to do a step forward in her career, and gets her opportunity in the following episode.

The third episode was the one in which they go to the celebration in which Don receives another prize. There he discovers that many company don't want to work with him because of his letter after the Lucky Strike issue. I liked this episode since I got to see Don's daughter a bit more. I love that character.

 

Pete starts out totally insufferable, but stick around on him

 

The Pete/Lane fight is an all-time classic.

“As soon as I raise my hands, I warn you, it shall be too late to run,” is probably the greatest way you can possibly open a fight.

“I know cooler heads should prevail, but am I the only one who wants to see this?” is a Roger classic.

And of course,

BECAUSE HE WAS CAUGHT WITH CHEWING GUM ON HIS PUBIS.

 

He is already less annoying than in the first season.

Betty has reached a new low when she told her daughter about Anna Draper, just because she was envious of Megan. She's really rotten inside.

On the other hand, I'm starting to love the two guys working with Peggy. They always make me laugh, the brilliant and eccentric Jew in particular.

 

He truly is a mad man.

 

In this dialogue there is a pretty complex explanation about the way the advertising company makes money. It's not straightforward for me.

Pete: They want to explore the idea of going with a fee structure as opposed to straight commission.
Someone else (Roger maybe) -ls there a difference? -
Lane: Well, it's a very interesting issue.
In its most simplistic form, the money we receive for work on an account is derived from the 15 % commission included in our media purchases, plus the markup on production costs. But under a fee structure, the client merely pays for the work being done, plus a negotiated one-and-a-half to 2% profit.

Just to see whether I understood:
Straight commission: they receive the 15 % of what the client spend in the media for their advertisement, plus an additional amount from the production costs (I guess with "production costs" it is referring to what is spent to actually making the advertising material?)
fee structure: they are just paid a fixed amount for the idea and realization, plus a percentage of what the client actually earns by selling the product.

Is it correct?

 

that conversation made my eyes glaze over too

 

I also love to see that what they do is coherent with the real map of New York City.
We discover that Don's house is in 72nd and Park. when he takes a taxi. In another episode, the daughter goes alone with her friend to the Natural history museum leaving from there, and it makes perfect sense because it is actually very close.
In these details, mistakes are very frequent but here they nailed it.

 

They’re not talking about taking a percentage of the client’s profits, but about setting a fixed profit margin for the company on that account’s work. The commission structure is an old ad-agency standard by which ad agencies made their money through a big markup on the cost of buying advertising time or space, plus some markup on additional costs. But they’re not necessarily directly billing on all costs associated with the work on the account (like hours for the copywriters); those costs and the general overhead of the agency (fixed costs regardless of the accounts, like paying the rent, the electric bill, the secretaries’ salaries, buying new typewriters) are coming out of that big commission. The fee structure is an alternative in which the agency is able to bill for all costs of production (including things like billing by the hour for creative) and set a fixed rate of profit on the total work (so the client pays all those costs plus two percent).

There’s a chance you make less money that way, but there’s also less risk you lose money if an account gets expensive, because you’re guaranteed profit. And the whole thing is the result of a court case in 1956 that banned the old industry standard, which was a sort of cartel arrangement between media and advertising agencies in which media set a price for ads, but agreed that ad agencies only had to pay them eighty-five percent of the price and could keep the other fifteen, and that’s how agencies made their money (it benefited the media sellers because if anyone tried to place an ad without going through an ad agency, the media company would charge full price and keep one hundred percent, and it’s this system of unequal pricing that was outlawed, opening the way to new payment structures (the commission structure was still legal, agencies just had to clearly distinguish between the ad price and the commission, and you could get the same media rate without going through an ad agency)).

 

@Havac
Excellent. So, if they are not sure to have total control on what they will spend to create the advertisement, it is more convenient to have the fee structure, so that whatever work they'll make will be paid. On the other hand, if they are not worried about the risk of spending too much, it might be better to just keep a percentage (15 % in this case) on what they spend to buy advertising time.
Got it! Thank you.

 

There's something I was thinking about Don. He bases his life on the attempt to make frivolous things look appealing and intriguing. That's his job and he is phenomenal at it. However, if we consider his personality, he is perhaps the one who is most detached from the triviality of consumer products. In most cases he appears not to care, and sometimes he is even slightly annoyed by what is generally considered cool stuff.

It is possible that his work has led him to rationalize and look at consumer products in a more analytic fashion, and this is why he never looks like he is particularly impressed by any of them.


Ps

Spoiler

nooooo Lane!

 

PS : yep

 

My rewatch is on season six, and I have to say, I had not remembered just how much of a creepy weirdo Cutler is.

I do, however, remember the most important question Mad Men ever asked: about ourselves, about our relationships, about life.

 

Shut the Door. Have a Seat is a contender for my favorite episode of the whole show.

It’s also part of the inspiration for my desire of a supercut of all Mad Men’s door-openness-related commentary.

 

I finished season six, and I have to say my opinion on it has shifted. It’s probably the third or maybe fourth time I’ve watched it, and probably the first since the whole series wrapped. And previously, I had thought it was the show’s weakest season (you might say it was not great, Bob). And that might still be true, given how strong the rest of the show is, but I certainly appreciated it a great deal more than I had previously. It just clicked with me now that I know where everything’s going.

 

Grimy little pimp.

 

If the two halves of season seven had been their own seasons, I’d say 7.1 was one of the show’s strongest and 7.2 one of its weakest. I’m not sure how I balance it out.