Glenn Reynolds rounds-up a number of recent comments from pundits and readers comparing the World’s Biggest Celebrity to the world’s best-known fictional ad man and identity thief, including this comment from reader Dodd Harris:
I don’t think that analogy is entirely fair — to Don Draper. This last season was about the harrowing of Don Draper, just as this political season was the harrowing of Obama. But Don at least experienced it before not really changing. He was tortured, pushed to his limits, and forced to at least acknowledge his past failures. In the end, he chose the easy fix, but he at least plumbed the depths of his own manufactured past before doing so.
I’ve seen no sign Obama has done any of that. He’s still blaming everyone but himself.
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I’d just like to point out that I may have been the first, or at least one of the first to note the comparison between the two men — certainly a negative comparison between the two men — way back in July of 2008:
“A man is whatever room he is in” — that’s a remarkably timely phrase right about now, isn’t it?
In retrospect, it certainly appears that way. Like Don Draper, Obama at his best was a master salesman. But in real-life, the best ad men know that the product has to be equal to the ad campaign, or customer disappointment will be palpable. Or as Mad Men advisor Jerry Della Femina wrote 40 years ago in his classic book on advertising, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War:
There is a great deal of advertising that’s better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster. There have been cases where the product had to come up to the advertising but when the product fails to do that, the advertiser will eventually run into a lot of trouble.
But then in 2008, Obama and his campaign staff, non-official and otherwise, were far more interested in making the initial sale than in providing a product that would keep customers satisfied over the long haul. And as was known forty years ago by Draper’s real-life counterparts, the advertiser eventually has run into a lot of trouble now that it’s been rather strongly established that the product in no way matches the ad campaign.
William Bernbach, who was revolutionizing the advertising industry when Jerry Della Femina’s manin “contribution” was self-promotion, said it better:
“Nothing destroys a bad product more quickly than great advertising.”
Jerry Della Femina is an ad legend, but not a “Mad Men” advisor. He is however a big fan of the show and the folks at Mad men are fans of his and Obama, by the way…
Jackla,
I’ve seen Websites that say that he was, such as this one, and the blurb from Matthew Weiner on “Pearl Harbor’s” Amazon page seems to confirm that.
And yes, listening to the audio commentary of the Mad Men DVDs, it’s obvious that Weiner and the rest of the Mad Men gang are Oba-groupies; Jon Hamm cut a pro-ObamaCare PSA and trashed the Tea Party as well.
Obviously, the most notable difference is that in a free market, if the product fails to deliver what was promised, one is not forced to purchase it again. And, word quickly spreads to potential consumers as to the products unworthiness, thus sparing them the shaft. However, all the government has to do it sell the public a bill of goods once, and the shaft belongs to everyone, for ever and ever, Amen. Yeah, consumers managed to have the managers of the company (the Dem Pols)fired for over promising and under delivering; nevertheless, the shaft that was sold remains.
Marketers love to create a cult brand because cult status guarantees a hard core of customers so emotionally invested in the brand that they not only won’t switch but they express their contempt for buyers of other brands. When a man buys a Harley Davidson jacket, a Valvoline gimmee cap, or a Smith & Wesson belt buckle, or when he puts a decal on his Ford of a little boy peeing on a Chevy emblem, he’s identifying himself with the cult brand. The marketers have succeeded in making him feel superior through identification with their brand, like a woman who just doesn’t feel right unless her sweater was designed by Donna Karan. Obama created a successful cult brand. The danger of a cult brand, though, is that marketers who overprice the product, oversell it, or let it grow obsolete, lose the customers who bought the product but didn’t join the cult. They feel a sense of disappointment for having bought the product instead of a sense of superiority. They may even join a competitive cult brand. If the creators of the Tea Party fall prey to the temptations which have undermined the Obama cult brand, they will lose popularity, too.
What ever happened to the comments on your False History post?