[image from TheVox]
My new post at LAist, "What Would Don Draper Tweet?" shares words from Hank Wasiak, ad man extraordinaire who started in advertising during the 60s and who is now fully embracing social media's potential to enhance the effectiveness of campaigns in his industry He's even incorporating social media into the class he's teaching next semester at USC's Marshall School of Business.
If “Mad Men” has taught us anything, it’s that advertising is all about the client and the product. But a “Mad Man” for the technology age urges ad firms to put the Don Draper era behind them and consider the consumer in a new manner: through the lens and the interactive venue of today’s social media tools.
By his own admission last week at the 140 Characters Conference (held at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood), Hank Wasiak has lived the “Mad Men” experience. He explained to the crowd of Twitter enthusiasts (this writer among them) that he had started at an advertising firm that he described as “the mirror image” of the fictional Sterling Cooper, an image that included similar clients, attitudes toward sex and drinking, and where they were “smoking something a lot stronger than Lucky Strikes.” It was a time, he says, when “the guys in suits showed us what we wanted to be and what we wanted to buy.” Until now, the essentials of advertising hadn’t changed. But after having witnessed everything in the business for the last five decades, he realized that “social media created the watershed moment.”
To read the rest of the post, click here.
Other posts at LAist:
Don Draper is a man's man Esther, no doubt about.
Posted by: Chris M | November 09, 2009 at 05:10 PM