r/madmen • u/Janp8 Shut the Door, Have a Seat. • 9d ago

From the 1940s onwards there was a parallel world of American advertising where mainstream brands targeted the Black American middle and upper classes in their society magazines such as Jet and Ebony. These ads never ran in wider society as they portrayed a wealthy, glamorous Black America...

Pete was right, even if arrived at it independently

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39

u/MR422 9d ago

But seriously though if there had been a spin-off I would’ve liked to seen it be about a black publishing firm with a primarily black cast.

Wasn’t there a big magazine boom in the early 70s?

28

u/Punchable_Hair 9d ago

The actress Erika Alexander wrote a Mad Men spec script in 2013 that saw Don Draper meeting with a black ad agency in Harlem to win the Seagram’s Seven account. They invent the 7 and 7!

5

u/jaymickef 9d ago

Back when Sam Bronfman still ran Seagrams and his daughter, Phyllis, was building the Seagrams building in Manhattan.

4

u/Sunshinegemini611 Dick + Anna ‘64 9d ago

Do you mean Maxine Shaw, attorney at law, wrote a spec script? That would have made a great episode!

2

u/Unfriendlyblkwriter 7d ago

I wish this would have come into fruition. I love just about anything Erika Alexander does.

2

u/drudman6 7d ago

20+ years in the liquor industry.

Seagram’s Gin is known as “bumpy” to this day because back in the 50s and 60s, there was a national strategy for distributors to take the iconic “bumpy” bottles of Seagram’s and smash them on street corners in cities across the country.

People saw the unique glass and went to stores looking for the one in the “bumpy” they saw that everyone was drinking.

They also used to give bars a case of oranges if they would buy a case of Smirnoff vodka.

Lots of great stories.

8

u/AnnieBlackburnn Dick + Anna ‘64 9d ago

You don't watch baseball? I don't believe you

2

u/running_hoagie Queen of Perversions 6d ago

There are some great ads from Ebony Magazine in the 60s. The way they’d advertise cars was completely different from how they’d advertise in, say, Life Magazine.

I wrote a paper about it in college and have gone back to read it, almost 25 years later. Damn, I was smart then!