In my favourite episode of the best TV present of the twenty first century, money is king. As a manner of slicing a Gordian Knot of company merging (put a pin in that for a second), the would-be founders of Sterling Cooper Draper Price are deciding which accounts they will carry/poach in order that they’ve a puncher’s likelihood of getting the enterprise off the bottom.
The lynchpin of the operation’s success is main the money cow of tobacco large Lucky Strike to their new Madison Avenue pasture. What Lucky Strike represents for SCDP isn’t status or assured riches however one thing much more essential for a fledgling enterprise: money movement. Lucky Strike means not simply “fine tobacco” however a prepared and dependable supply of money to spend on the agency’s working bills: payroll, hire, and the humdrum prices of doing enterprise. This is the inspiration on which smaller and extra speculative shoppers (the upstart sport of Jai-Lai and the unglamorous laxative model Secor) may be fastidiously stacked. This is the rock upon which they resolve a advertising and marketing church may be constructed. And, ultimately, they’re proper. In the very subsequent episode, which kicks off Season 4, we leap ahead to a completely armed and operational…properly operation. Secretaries clack away, and junior execs mill about, and copywriters sit round determining the best way to make suitcases fascinating. Be cautious what you want for, for you’ll absolutely get it.
Because finally, as a service firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Price’s best asset is its consumer record. Everything else the agency does is in service of getting and retaining that record.
It’s the belief that will get me. Don Draper has a second the place he realizes they will simply give up (or slightly have a co-conspirator hearth them) and take their shoppers with them. It’s that straightforward.
When studying Dan Sinykin’s current e-book, Big Fiction, I considered this scene. The conglomeration of promoting companies dramatized in Mad Men is contemporaneous with the corporatization in e-book publishing that he chronicles. The tales are strikingly comparable: household/intently held corporations set up worthwhile corporations in rising industries and thus develop into morsels for bigger corporations to gobble up.
The measurement, complexity, and sheen of the businesses constructed on each books and promoting masked primarily easy companies. In promoting, it was performing as a dealer between the Hiltons and Kodak’s of the world and the newspapers, radio, magazines, and TV that had advert area to fill. In e-book publishing, it was (and is) performing as a dealer between writers and the book-buying public. This is effective work to events on each side of the transaction, however with conglomeration comes a give attention to profit-seeking–and, extra consequentially, increasing income.
What if it had been doable for some renegade group to interrupt off a significant writer and create their very own model of Sterling Cooper Draper Price? Rather than succumb to the Borg, they jumped in a shuttle and established an outpost someplace? Who would do the breaking off, and what would they take with them? Put one other manner, what’s transportable that the folks with cash to spend need? In Mad Men, it was the concepts from Don Draper and the private relationships solid by Roger Sterling/Pete Campbell, and a bit of enterprise acumen offered by Layne Price. This could possibly be performed in publishing.
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