Adventures in Marketing: How could you, Don?

Perhaps I'm just resentful that $90 cardigans don't feature heavily on my shopping list, but even just passing the poster for the new Mad Men Collection at a well-known clothing store every day makes me grumpy. It's not that I object to retailers taking inspiration from cultural trends (far from it; the sooner H&M brings out a Clueless-inspired collection, the better as far as I'm concerned). It's more the dubious sell-out this represents for what is, to my mind, one of television's finest artistic achievements.


I mean, seriously: a tie-in clothing line? There go the many, many hours of my life I've wasted telling naysayers that it's not just about really, really good-looking smokers in sharp suits and amazing dresses.

Personal pique aside, the fact is that despite becoming phenomenally popular, Mad Men possessed something incredibly hard to come by: genuine credibility and genuine cool. And the thing about credibility and cool is that once you've lost them - say, by cashing-in on a fashion range - you can never, ever get them back. My head knows that the show's brilliance isn't really diminished by the Mad Men™ Collection Leopardprint Trench, but my heart doesn't - and that's kind of what matters.

For me, this goes beyond the age-old arguments against selling-out to say a lot about issues surrounding the way brands and institutions speak to their fans - and how close they let them get. Organizations have woken up to the fact that audiences want more - more access, more say, more engagement - and they're eager to give it to stay relevant. Yet I'd argue that in the scrabble to engage their audiences, brands have to be mindful of giving too much away. There's such a thing as mystique, and it's irretrievable. Access is fantastic, over-familiarity is not; I want a thrilling glimpse behind-the-scenes, but I don't want to see the staff toilet, you know?

The annoying thing about this whole Mad Men shebang is that AMC already does fantastic, consistently engaging work via social media and the impressively well-maintained MM blog, keeping fans like me interested even when the show's not on the TV. (I'm betting you know at least one person that had their 'Mad Men Yourself' cartoon as their Facebook profile, too.) So, for me at least, it seems it's more about sharing the right kind of content with your audience - stuff that is authentic and rings true - and not making accessibility a byword for overexposure. Limited Edition or not.