Hasta La Creative!

In November 1968, the Hershey Foods Corp. announced that it would be talking to a "pre-screened" list of agencies about taking on its advertising business. Hershey was not just looking for a new agency but, despite the late date, its first in the United States. Called "the country’s most famous advertising holdout" by The New York Times, the candy bar maker had leaned hard on the late Milton Hershey’s dictum that the best advertising was a quality product. Mass media changed that, however, and the company ended up hiring Ogilvy & Mather and becoming the major advertiser we know today.

Now, we don’t know this next part for a fact, but it’s safe to say that when Hershey’s marketing men made the rounds on the real Madison Ave. they didn’t hear the old A-Hershey-Bar-Was-the-Highlight-Of-My-Orphaned-Childhood-Among-the-Whores pitch. Nope, nobody does it quite like Don Draper, for whom the truth is as destructive as his lies.

Don’s pitches are typically full of nostalgia and slick nonsense, but the sixth season of "Mad Men" was bookended by a pair of brutally honest moments with unsuspecting clients. In the premiere, Don unsettled the Royal Hawaiian Hotel with what was essentially an ad for death. In the season finale, Don pivots from some schmaltzy idea of what a candy bar meant to his — entirely imagined — happy childhood to what we might now call a moment of radical transparency. The movement from death to brutal truth is good; it’s just the context we might question. You know, in front of a prospective client and some pissed-off partners. That context.

Continue reading at AdAge.com