The maxim that there’s “no such thing as bad publicity” is being put to the test by the McCann advertising agency (fittingly enough), which is making hay of its villainous role in Mad Men’s final season. As regular viewers of the TV series know—and as irregular viewers might not want to know yet, so if that’s you, hit your back button now instead of making a stink later—this final half-season has seen McCann-Erickson absorb Sterling Cooper & Partners into its vast corporate structure. The transition has not gone well, mostly because the McCann depicted on Mad Men is a soulless, misogynistic hell where creativity goes to die.
In the real world of today, McCann has a sense of humor about being the prestige-TV mascot for everything wrong with advertising, capitalism, and humanity. More specifically, McCann’s social media guy has a sense of humor about it. And the agency’s online embrace of #MadMen is paying off: Adweek reports that McCann’s Twitter mentions have spiked 46 percent since the McCann-is-the-devil storyline got underway. That’s right, Ferg Donnelly’s slimy advances and Jim Hobart’s dick-swinging are actually helping McCann, at least in terms of “engagement,” the only currency that matters to anyone, ever.
Among McCann’s popular Mad Men tweets are a number of images that demonstrate how efficiently and heartlessly our favorite characters would be assimilated into the hegemony:
The feed also includes a series of decreasingly logical Star Wars references:
And other amusing observations:
As #MadMen tweets go, it’s all decent, playful stuff. Nothing too memorable, sure, but nothing terrible, either. You could be perfectly happy here in the McCann Twitter feed. Just relax and take off your jacket. It’s a shirtsleeves Twitter feed.
[via loyal reader odduck in the Mad Men review comments]