Actually, Tim Lombardi says the show inspired him to go into advertising. But since we’re talking about advertising, I thought “drove” was more active and catchy. Tim Lombardi is the Director of Strategy & Analytics at Sq1, a boutique (another great advertising word), full-service digital ad agency based out of Dallas, with offices in Houston […]
Actually, Tim Lombardi says the show inspired him to go into advertising. But since we’re talking about advertising, I thought “drove” was more active and catchy.
Tim Lombardi is the Director of Strategy & Analytics at Sq1, a boutique (another great advertising word), full-service digital ad agency based out of Dallas, with offices in Houston and Portland, Ore.
Lombardi works in Portland and wanted to talk about the influences of the AMC show, Mad Men, which aired its final episode last month after seven seasons.
Much has been written about Mad Men, the characters and time period, and the show’s influence on television and advertising.
President Obama, a Mad Men fan, talking about equal pay for women, said in his State of the Union address that, “it is time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a Mad Men episode.”
Lombardi, a big fan of the show, says he was inspired to a career in advertising by the show’s main character, Don Draper.
“When he gets into a client pitch,” says Lombardi, speaking of Draper, “he just turns it on, and there’s something very exciting about that. And so when I had to declare a major in college, I chose advertising.”
Mad Men is set in the 1960s and the attention to detail about the fashion, the culture and habits of that era by the series creator, Matthew Weiner, has helped endear the show to its fans.
“Drinking and smoking were definitely a part of it, back then,” says Lombardi.
“The irony of what I find in Mad Men is the characters struggle to find happiness and these are the same folks who are selling the dream of satisfaction.”
Although Lombardi admits that he’s not old enough to have been around in the ’60s, older mentors of his have said “the show was pretty accurate, especially the interaction between the different departments. Overall, from a culture stand point, the communications between the different departments like you see with lots of popular characters in the show still exists.”
Lombardi says the major difference between ad agencies then and ad agencies today is television. “Back then the strategy was focused on one channel, TV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEfx9epJKEg
“They can launch a TV campaign, and have no idea how it performs until 2-3 months down the road.”
Today at his agency, SQ1, he says “we’re not looking at just TV or radio, we’re trying to combine those with a digital campaign. How agencies interact today, we like to prove out marketing success, what’s our ROI? It’s based on data, not conjecture any more. We can focus on what consumers we want and what digital channel can we reach them.”
When I asked Lombardi how he sees TV stations using digital media, he says, “I don’t watch the news but I have all these alerts on my phone from TV stations.”
He sees anchors and reporters using social media as a way to recruit viewers.
“Facebook and Twitter allow reporters and anchors to personally brand themselves. They build up an influential following, and those followers may watch the news, but they’re also interested the activities of those reporters. It’s a personal brand that’s connecting back to the TV station.”
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