The brief was to promote the TV show, Mad Men, the drama series about the smooth-talking advertising men of Madison Avenue in the politically incorrect 60s.To do this, we invented a fictional company, 'Madison Avenue Cookware' and then advertised the kitchenware in a sexist tone to reflect the era and content of MadMen.All channels led to the madisonproducts.com.au website where the reveal took place.

One week before the launch of the show, we ran TV, radio, print and outdoor ads that drove people to the Madison Products website. In order to create interest and a bit of good old-fashioned controversy, the website did not reveal the show at this stage of the campaign. Instead, it simply announced the arrival of the new kitchenware range and welcomed any feedback, which it received in droves.Once we had the attention we wanted, the reveal was built into the website. Now when people arrived at the site, they saw the company name and slogan, “Madison Avenue, Making Everyday New”, seamlessly morph into the show title “Mad Men”. The campaign line “Advertising in the 60s” then rose up through the smoke to make sense of the supposedly sexist campaign.At the site, people could find out more about the show and email the campaign to their friends.

The TV ad was posted on YouTube, receiving thousands of hits in only a few days, and did the social media rounds on hundreds of blog sites, including New York Mag, Twitter, Adrants, Business Weekend and Mamamia to name a few. From a consumer point of view, it was met with laughs and curiosity by some, and pure outrage by others.It worked though. The campaign objective was to ensure an audience capture rate of 200,000 for the launch episode, which it greatly exceeded, with 410,000 people tuning in for the first episode. An excellent result considering the series had already been shown on PAY-TV the year before.