The hit show 'Mad Men' had been on hiatus for a year, and Newsweek had arranged a dedicated 'Mad Men' issue to celebrate the show’s return in the spring of 2012. Our objective was to draw attention to the special issue, get advertisers to run in the 'Mad Men' special issue, and create buzz to help spur newsstand sales.

It’s a magazine that sells advertising reporting a fictional show about selling advertising. We thought, why not blur the line between the editorial content and the paid advertising. Let’s make the advertising part of the entertainment value of the issue. We’d make the advertisers’ participation be newsworthy in itself, from a content standpoint.

We created a media kit to invite advertisers and their agencies to submit specially-designed, retro versions of their ads, as if they were done by fictional 60s adman, Don Draper. The magazine was also redesigned, cover-to-cover, to reflect Newsweek's vintage look from the 60s. Clients such as Mercedes, Allstate, Spam, Benneton, British Airways, Estee Lauder, Bloomingdales, John Hancock, Johnnie Walker and others all contributed special, one-off retro layouts for the issue.

Newsweek had its biggest single-issue jump in new advertisers in the magazine's 80-plus year history. The Mad Men Issue ended up making news itself for its retro design and advertisements, with mainstream coverage on such outlets as The New York Times, CBS this Morning, MSNBC, Entertainment Tonight, ABCNews, BuzzFeed, Esquire, Huffington Post, Life & Style, The Atlantic, Charlie Rose, The Hollywood Reporter and Fast Company.

And while magazine ad sales have been trending down across the industry, Newsweek saw its ad pages jump 27.5% over the quarter with the Newsweek issue being that period’s biggest seller.

This idea created news not only around the issue, but around the advertisers who ran ads in the issue. The sales team at the magazine had a great angle to promote. The advertising wasn’t an interruption from the editorial content. Rather, it was a perfect complement.