This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at USFSP chapter.

Those close to me know that Mad Men is one of my all-time favorite television shows. Ideally, if I could visit the 1960’s without the oppressive and systemic misogyny, racism, and homophobia, I would in a heartbeat. I like the fashion, the music, and the revolutions. Can you blame me?

Mad Men is a historical fiction drama based on the real-life “mad men” (“Madison Avenue men”) of the 1960’s — the big, powerful men of advertising in New York City. For seven action-packed seasons, Mad Men follows the professional and personal lives of the men and women of Sterling Cooper, a swanky advertising agency full of juicy, high-class drama. Everything about the show is very authentic to the era and the show is truly is a beautifully-produced work of art, winning numerous Emmy, Critic’s Choice, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors’ Guild awards for the show itself and its individual performers.

Mad Men’s plots and characters are fictional, but I’ve learned so much about the world of advertising from watching, particularly the creative aspect of the art. Of course, you’re seeing the world of advertising from the lens of a different time, but nevertheless, many tools and tactics of the advertising world are ageless. Certain tricks of the trade are still utilized by modern ad agencies who produce the magazine pages and commercials we see today. Technology has developed, but the malleability of the human psyche never changes, and that’s really what advertising is truly about. Advertising at the core is just pure psychology.

In the show, companies (most of them actually real-life brands still existing today) ask Sterling Cooper to design advertisements for their products or services that will attract the most business possible and beat out their competitors. Clients then meet with the agency later to see what the ad men have to offer them for ideas. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch the pitch meetings where Don Draper and the creative team try to sell their ad ideas to the company. A Sterling Cooper pitch meeting is nothing short of an elaborate performance.

In pitches for print ads specifically, the team presents options for illustrations and slogans using flowery language and romantic anecdotes, speaking to the client softly and sweetly almost like a mother to a child, but not in a condescending manner. The end goal is for the client to say, “Yes, we like this idea. Let’s do this ad campaign. You’re hired.” It’s ironic that the ad agency itself uses persuasion to win over the business of the company, and then the company in turn persuades the consumer; it’s a domino effect. Don Draper especially is so smooth; he’s charmingly handsome, tall, possesses a commanding presence, and is an exceptionally eloquent speaker. You’ll notice that hardly anyone has a difficult time paying attention and listening to him. He’s a perfect ad man. He could sell anything.

In the show, you’ll see a string of common themes in ad campaigns themselves, from Clearasil to John Deere to Cool Whip. Such themes include childhood, innocence, nostalgia, romance, and camaraderie — concepts that invoke feelings of comfort, security, and happiness universally across all humankind. Think about advertisements in the real world; many of them also encompass these same warm, fuzzy themes.

You get to see how the creative team applies their knowledge of the human mind and how to make people want things. Advertising agencies, real-life ones and Sterling Cooper both, live and breathe consumerism. They’ll tell you how their product will enhance your life and how it will give you X, Y, and even Z. They know exactly how to wrap themselves around your finger. They know how to get in our heads and reach the deepest levels of our subconscious. They want you to melt like putty in their hands. And every waking minute of their careers revolve around one basic idea: enamoring you to get your attention, and once they have you hooked, enticing you to give them your money.

While I will always love the puppy from Budweiser, the famously progressive biracial family from Cheerios, and that classic Old Spice whistle, I know now that advertising is not always innocent fun and games. Some truly ugly things can happen behind the curtain and we as consumers don’t notice them right away. It’s common practice for all kinds of industries to strategically target populations from which they can draw the most business, but the existing evidence that alcohol and tobacco industries disproportionately target the low-income, minority demographics and children in their marketing is monumental. My opinion is that the actions of the alcohol and tobacco industries are conspicuous and maliciously intentional.

Why poor, minority communities?

Let’s start with the poor. Socioeconomic status here in the United States dictates almost every aspect of your life: where you live, where you go to school, what (if any) food gets put on your table, your health, the difficulty in which you pay your bills, etc. In a capitalist-style economy such as the American economy, your money means everything. Dr. David Williams and Dr. Chiquita Collins in a 2001 entry for the journal Public Health Reports discuss how social stressors lead individuals to reach for coping mechanisms such as alcohol and tobacco products in order to feel relief from their everyday sufferings and hardships. An enormous social stressor on people with low socioeconomic status is obviously financial problems. Especially for people who have a predisposition to depression or anxiety disorders, being of low socioeconomic status can easily trigger these mental illnesses to erupt. Even if mental illnesses don’t run in your family history, if certain stresses in your life are chronic and severe enough, one can develop and you could feel temptation to use unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol or tobacco. Additionally, if someone cannot afford health insurance, they won’t have access to appropriate treatments or medications they may benefit from. Therefore, they may become dependent on the bottle or packs of cigarettes to keep them calm in their chronic stress.

Minorities. The last U.S. Census was conducted in 2010 and according to its data, white people in this country have the lowest rate of people below the poverty line at 11.6%. The highest rates of people below the poverty line belong to, in order:

American Indians and Alaskan Natives (27%)

African-Americans (25.8%)

Hispanics/Latinos (23%)

Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders (17.6%)

Americans of minority races, simply because of they stand out amongst the majority race (whites), face social stressors that white Americans do not. This is why people say your race all by itself sets you up for a certain destiny in this country. The data especially for alcohol advertising speaks for itself. Dr. Hackbarth from the Journal of Public Health Policy led a study of 50 Chicago neighborhoods resulting in alarming data: an average of 7 alcohol billboards in white areas and an average of 38 in minority areas. A survey of billboards in St. Louis found that there are twice as many advertisements for alcohol in African-American neighborhoods than white neighborhoods. Dr. Maria Luisa Alaniz, a professor from San Jose State University, conducted a study in California and found that there are five times more advertisements for alcohol in predominantly Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods compared to predominantly white neighborhoods. She also discovered that in the communities she studied, an average Hispanic/Latino student comes across up to 60 storefront ads for alcohol in their area just on their way home from school. These are only a few of the studies out there.

Alcohol and tobacco companies want the business of minority communities because they know they can get it, and they also know they can likely get it with more ease than from white communities. According to Dr. Williams’ and Dr. Collins’ 2001 research, neighborhoods predominantly composed of minority families endure much higher levels of violence, financial stress, family issues, and chronic illness.

So….the crossroads of the poor and the minorities? Big, big money.

Why children?

To take advantage of immature, fragile, and easily impressionable minds is not only twisted, but proves to have detrimental results because people who begin abusing alcohol as children are statistically at the greatest risk for alcohol-related problems later in life compared to people who begin abusing alcohol as adults. According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, American children are exposed to more alcohol advertising than adults at or above the legal drinking age of 21. The school also reports that young people who begin drinking before the age of 15 are four times more likely to become alcohol dependent than those who wait until 21, and they are seven times more likely to be in a vehicle crash due to alcohol in their lifetimes. Alcohol advertisements desire to place their efforts on children because they know that children will be the next generation of consumers. Even though it’s illegal for them to drink alcohol at this age, oversaturating their lives with the idea of drinking while they’re young encourages drinking as soon as possible.

The relationship between the tobacco industry and children is equally as distressing. Just like the alcohol industry, the tobacco industry recognizes that the focus of their efforts should be on children because they are the next generation of smokers — the next wave of business. A famous case known as The United States vs. Phillip Morris shed light on the tobacco industry’s long-standing, pernicious influence on children. In 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice sued a handful of tobacco companies for a slew of reasons, all revolving around the idea that the companies have deliberately lied to the public in so many ways for decades. The companies were being accused of violating pieces of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act, which deals with organized crime. According to the Public Health Law Center, they were being sued by the D.O.J. for, “misleading the public about the risks of smoking, misleading the public about the danger of secondhand smoke, misrepresenting the addictiveness of nicotine, manipulating the nicotine delivery of cigarettes, deceptively marketing cigarettes characterized as ‘light’ or ‘low tar’ while knowing that those cigarettes were at least as hazardous as full-flavored cigarettes, and intentionally not producing safer cigarettes.” Another huge reason was for “targeting the youth market.” If the tobacco industries would be deceitful in all these other ways, the claim that they intentionally target children is not in the least bit doubtful.

Seven years later in 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler deemed the tobacco companies responsible for all the claims made against them. She stated, “As set forth in these Final Proposed Findings of Fact, substantial evidence establishes that Defendants have engaged in and executed, and continue to engage in and execute, a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO.” The companies then filed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but the court’s three judges unanimously upheld Judge Kessler’s decision. Big Tobacco defended itself by saying that every message they sent across to the consumer market should be protected by their First Amendment rights, but the court found that fraudulent statements are in fact not protected by the First Amendment.

I believe that there are two different schools of reaction to this issue. Obviously, I and many others believe that the alcohol and tobacco industries are unethical in their advertising strategies. But on the other hand, some people take a “business is business” approach. In other words, some people believe that companies have the right to do anything and everything they need to do to be successful, even if it has to mean taking advantage of vulnerable populations. Even children apparently are fair game for targeted marketing. In 1996, David Moore, a marketing professor from the University of Michigan, argued in an article for the journal Ethnicity and Disease, “Part of a marketer’s job is to target specific segments of the population, find out exactly what those segments desire, and fulfill those desires.” While this is a logical business approach, many would argue that it’s still wrong to take advantage of certain people. Just because you can gain something valuable from doing something, does it always mean you should?

All we can hope for is that everyone opens their eyes to the indisputable facts and evidence in front of us and forms an educated opinion.

With love and hope for a brighter future for us all,

Annie

Citations:

http://www.psu.edu/ur/archives/BUSINESS/Targeting.html

https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf

http://www.camy.org/resources/fact-sheets/hispanic-youth-and-alcohol-adv…

https://usflearn.instructure.com/courses/1253057/files/folder/Course%20R…

https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0008.pdf

http://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/tobacco-control/tobacco-cont…

https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh22-4/286.pdf

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