I love AMC’s Mad Men. Of course, I’m seriously bothered by the way women are treated and the way they behave in it, and I’m ever-grateful I don’t have to wear hose and heels to work, but it is set in 1960 and that was life then.
Unfortunately, the magnificent ballsy bravado of that time has also gone the way of unchecked blatant sexual harassment and laser-breast bras.
That is sad. The bravado loss, not the bras.
Okay, so maybe the 3 (plus)-martini lunch had its downsides, but what did we lose with it and the other indulgences of times past? We’ve lost connecting with our clients, and their clients, in a special way. There is a bond formed in shared experiences and the more different and individual the experience, the better the bond. We all have stories from our (mis-spent?) youths of the time when “some friends and I _____” [fill in the blank with details you will never tell your kids]. Well, in the past (and a few times more recently) these sorts of stories existed between creatives and clients. I think we’ve lost something with them.
We used to bond with clients by shared experiences–ones that broke certain barriers. Back in the Mad Men day, there were bigger, clearer barriers to break (there was a great scene where a client talked negatively about some professional man not wearing a hat) so maybe it was easier. But we have got to find ways to reconnect, to give great experiences to clients so the stories and bonding can take place.
Maybe that doesn’t mean getting drunk at lunch…in fact I can pretty much bet on that one being gone, but that doesn’t mean we have to be a bunch of meek Beta males and females. Instead, as creatives we should find other ways of creating shared experiences and I think the most successful of those will definitely cross out of that self-imposed “safe” corral.