Mad Men's Manhattan. Mark P. Bernardo

the slogan, “We try harder because we’re Number Two”) and “soft sell” over “hard sell.” DDB became one of the most influential agencies in history, changing the way many creative people think about advertising.

      This theme develops in how the young lions of Sterling Cooper—Harry Crane, Ken Cosgrove, Paul Kinsey, and Peggy Olson— approach their work under the tutelage of the older, but forward-thinking, Don Draper. Don himself seems to invite comparisons to Bill Bernbach, widely regarded as the ad industry’s most influential figure of the twentieth century. Bernbach, like Don, was a creative visionary who approached his work with a hint of arrogance. Also like Don, Bernbach presented himself as a conservative, old school “square” among increasingly younger, more hip coworkers and subordinates, but was widely regarded as the engine that made the creative department run. One could imagine some of Bernbach’s famous quotations about the business coming from the mouth of Don Draper. “Rules are what the artist breaks,” he said. “The memorable never emerged from a formula.” He warned, “Logic and over-analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea. It’s like love—the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears.”

       Sterling Cooper’s main rival for ad accounts, Doyle Dane Bernbach, is now part of the Omnicom Group, headquartered at 237 Madison Avenue.

      A Season 1 episode of Mad Men drives the comparison home, along with some of the series’ themes, when the Sterling Cooper crew discusses one of the controversial 1960s campaigns that put DDB on the map, the “Think Small” campaign for German automaker Volkswagen, which debuted in 1959 and was voted as the number one ad campaign of all time by Advertising Age magazine in 1999. Another very memorable, and controversial, campaign was the notorious “Daisy” television commercial for Lyndon Johnson’s presidential reelection bid in 1964, depicting a young girl in a meadow, picking petals off a flower, only to be interrupted by the mushroom cloud of a Soviet nuclear strike. The ad is widely credited with sealing Johnson’s victory over challenger Barry Goldwater and landed Maxwell Dane, its likely creator, on Richard Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.” (In Mad Men’s first season, which takes place during the presidential campaign of 1960, Sterling Cooper had handled the ads for Nixon’s first presidential bid four years previously.)

      Many of a certain age will remember other award-winning and genre-challenging DDB ad campaigns: Life cereal’s “Mikey” commercials, Chanel’s “Share the Fantasy,” and the “Gorilla” spots for American Tourister luggage.

      Also like Sterling Cooper, DDB became part of a larger corporation after years as an independent firm: in 1986, it merged with Needham, Harper & Steers, a Chicago firm that had several coveted accounts, including General Mills, Continental Airlines and McDonald’s, and was a pioneer in the fast-growing segment of television advertising. The new DDB-Needham then joined another large firm, BBDO (also referenced several times on Mad Men) to form the huge Omnicom Group, whose offices are still located on the advertising industry’s most famous boulevard. The modernist office tower at 437 Madison Avenue, with its black marble plaza, granite benches, and ornate lampposts, is also the headquarters of CNBC, the Rockefeller Bros. Fund, Nixon-Peabody, and the Carnegie Corporation, among others.

      Young and Rubicam

      The only other agency referenced on Mad Men that retains a Madison Avenue address today is Young and Rubicam, at 285 Madison Avenue, at 41^st Street. When Duck first interviews at Sterling Cooper in Season 1, we learn that he has recently worked in Y&R’s London office.

      Cofounder Robert Rubicam, regarded along with Bernbach as one of the twentieth century’s most influential ad men, made his name as a copywriter for his former employer, the N. W. Ayer Company, penning the hugely influential “Instrument of the Immortals” ad for Steinway Pianos. Passed over for the copy chief job he had hoped for when the company’s ownership transferred to the founder’s son-in-law, Rubicam partnered with another disgruntled Ayer employee, John Orr Young, to form a new agency in 1923 (the same year Sterling Cooper was founded).

      Like the Sterling Cooper offices depicted on Mad Men, the atmosphere at Y&R was famously loose in its structure. Employees arrived late in the morning and worked long into the evening. Like Bert Cooper, Sterling Cooper’s eccentric cofounder and senior partner, who doesn’t bat an eye when he learns about Don Draper’s secret past, Rubicam hired and promoted people based more on their talent and creativity than on their educational background. He cultivated a team atmosphere, with copywriters, artists, and photographers huddling together at marathon creative sessions at odd hours—another trait of Don’s team. The unorthodox methods produced impressive results: the agency landed such coveted accounts as Bristol-Myers, Gulf Oil, and Packard automobiles. Along with DDB, Ogilvy and Mather, and Leo Burnett, Y&R helped usher in the explosive growth of the ad business in the 1960s. (Ogilvy’s book Confessions of an Ad Man is referenced in Season 3.) In 1979, Y&R merged with the huge Marsteller agency, expanding its reach into the growing public relations business and accelerating its growth into the industry leader it is today. Its current roster of clients includes Kraft Foods, Miller Beer, Colgate Palmolive, AT&T, and Citibank. One of its most memorable campaigns was the series of TV spots with comedian Bill Cosby pitching Jell-O Pudding. In 2000, Y&R was taken over by a larger British agency, WPP Group.

      Although you cannot generally get a tour of these famous firms’ offices, a visitor to the city can still get a sense of Madison Avenue’s historic cachet as the hub of the ad business. Take a stroll up the sidewalk alongside Madison, starting at the corner of 42^nd Street and heading north to 50^th (ending, appropriately enough, at the Omnicom building), and you’ll see a tribute to that history flying on flags above the street. The Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame was established in 2004 as part of the city’s first Advertising Week, a now annual gathering of North American advertising, media, and marketing professionals. The flags exhibit tributes to ad campaigns, icons, and slogans both recent and historic, all of which have been inducted into the Walk of Fame in an annual public vote conducted by Yahoo and USA Today. The inductees include classics like Tony the Tiger, Colonel Sanders, Orville Reddenbacher, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and Mr. Peanut, as well as modern favorites like the AFLAC duck, the Geico Gecko, and AOL’s “running man.” The flags on the lampposts feature recent inductees.

      Bloomingdale’s

      Besides being known for advertising, Madison Avenue is also renowned as a shopping destination. An important storyline in Season 1 revolves around Sterling Cooper’s efforts to produce a campaign for the fictional Menken’s department store, a Jewish-owned business in Manhattan’s midtown shopping district (it is described as “sharing a wall with Tiffany’s”) that is seeking to revitalize its image to compete with well-known contemporaries Bloomingdale’s, Henri Bendel, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bonwit-Teller.

       Bloomingdale’s (59^th Street at 3^rd Avenue) merits special mention; it is where Pete and Trudy Campbell register for their wedding, and where Pete endured the emasculating experience of standing in line to return a duplicate wedding gift in the Season 1 episode “Red in the Face.” One of the pioneers of what we now call department stores, Bloomingdale’s started in 1872, as Joseph and Lyman Bloomingdale’s East Side Bazaar, selling a variety of mostly European-style fashion garments. Joseph and Lyman’s father, Benjamin Bloomingdale, was the first American retailer to introduce the hoop skirt, a nineteenth-century fashion fad, to the U.S from Europe. The brothers moved their store to 59^th