How marketers turned the idea of a target audience back on themselves, creating a unique feedback loop whose reverberations may be partly responsible for the show’s success.

A strange thing happened with the AMC series Mad Men, now in its second season. The marketing team responsible for bringing in viewers took a sophisticated serial, about the supposed Golden Age of Advertising, and poured a large part of their efforts right back into attracting present-day advertising professionals. They’ve essentially turned the idea of a target audience back on themselves, creating a unique feedback loop whose reverberations may be partly responsible for the show’s success.

Not that Mad Men doesn’t appeal to people outside of that particular industry — the show itself is great — or that going after people who can relate to a show is a new idea. You can bet Project Greenlight went after filmmakers, Project Runway goes after designers, and so on. But for non-reality shows this seems new. Does F/X’s The Shield get a huge push with cops, dirty or otherwise? Does Lost get more viewers who live on islands? Heroes definitely chases people who love comic books, but that’s not the same as courting people who do what your characters do for a living. People with superpowers aren’t easy to come by, and even if they were, it’d be hard to pin down which marketing channels would best reach them.

Maybe it’s a question of budget. AMC may not be able to afford the billboards and bus stop posters that HBO liberally papers with promotion for their new series. So instead, they go full force making sure their best bets aren’t just interested, but feel compelled to watch. See, for example, their full 16-page section in Ad Age from earlier this summer.

The massive insert, which took over the whole back section of the magazine, mimics the publication’s layout while promoting the DVD set and upcoming season in a clean, vintage ad style that’s like cat-nip for art directors. The rest is extremely copy-heavy, and as the Ad Age editor puts it in the explanatory blurb, top corner of page 1:

“You’ll see reprints of actual articles [from 1960],… some ‘then and now’ comparisons… And then there is the creative license — a one on one interview with [Mad Men lead character] Don Draper, a portfolio… the [fictional] agency’s latest account wins, with a bit of gossip mixed in.”

The piece reads as part extended back-story or show primer, and part history lesson for today’s advertisers. And by running in a professional publication, more Variety than Entertainment Weekly for ad folks, they managed to make reading about a TV show feel like it qualified as work.

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It doesn’t hurt either that the real-life ad men of today are of two generations. The older, which fondly recalls the simpler, more debaucherous good old days akin to the ones Mad Men depicts, and the younger, which hears about ‘how it used to be’ and is fascinated by this era they missed out on. Full disclosure: my day job is in advertising and I fall fully under the latter. In fact, I first heard about the show from a teaser ad in the same magazine leading up to its premiere, and gave it a shot for exactly the reasons above before the show itself sucked me in.

Then of course there’s the older ones, who take it upon themselves to write columns either praising or nitpicking the show’s treatment of how they remember it. What a great excuse for people who normally critique thirty to sixty second commercials to step up and critique a full show, thereby dedicating even more business publication space to covering entertainment. In Barbara Lippert’s recent Adweek piece, for example, she comments on how distracting the inconsistencies were before moving on to the show itself, with a handy analogy we all reach for in our moments of aspiring TV criticism:

“I guess it’s harder to accept someone else’s made-up version of the relatively recent past. You think your own (made-up) version is better. So it took me until Season 2, which debuted this past Sunday, to see that my obsessive view was in fact making me the dim one. The first show of the new season was the best ever, setting up psychologically intricate story arcs that will play out all year in grandly satisfyingly Sopranos-like fashion.

Which completes the top-to-bottom infiltration of the ad industry — the old guard is enthralled, the kids are captivated. Phase one complete for the forces behind Mad Men.

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A greater point here bears consideration though. As more and more people find themselves in the ever-broadening marketing services sector, their strategy to push a show about advertising specifically toward advertising people may have created some sort of perfect storm. Counting up all the people who work in some sort of agency isn’t enough to sustain a show, but does provide a built-in audience large enough to at least serve as a springboard to success. After all, real-life ad men are famous for their egos, so of course they would watch a show whose hero is the ultimate ad guy — the suave and brilliant archetype they all imagine themselves being (more full disclosure: ask anyone who works at an agency, “Which character does what you do?” and they will begrudgingly admit which role they play, but almost certainly follow up with, “But also a little bit of what Don does.” He’s the figure we all strive to be). Not to mention that those same people are probably already in the habit of influencing the TV habits of their friends and family, giving this tactic a sort of snowball effect.

Giving the advertisers — both behind the scenes and in front of the screens — all the credit for the show’s hit status would be simplistic. Of course the excellent writing, acting, and production are the most important factors. The 16 Emmy nominations they picked up for season one (including Oustanding Drama Series) couldn’t have hurt either. Whatever they’re doing seems to be working, because Mad Men came back to more than double their viewers this season. But the odd mix of insider interest and super-focused marketing might have contributed to the fact that they even made it to a second season in the first place; after all, which other AMC shows have made it this far? Something tells me there isn’t a huge push focused on America’s meth lab owners still in the works for Breaking Bad.