'Money spent on a set of eyelashes will always pay dividends in the office beauty stakes."

This post from five years ago is worth a seasonal revival. For all those missing Mad Men, here's the real thing.

On Adam Curtis's The Medium and the Message blog, there is an absolutely fascinating record of the real life world of UK advertising, filmed roughly around the time that the last series of Mad Men was set. It's quite astonishingly strange. The boundaries between the sexes, between 'management' and 'staff' and between young and old seem so much more pronounced than they are today, and yet the essentials of human nature haven't changed at all. The idea that an ad agency party in the so-called swinging sixties would be planned to finish at 6.30 pm seems hilarious. At one point we hear what I think is John Lennon's Cold Turkey on the soundtrack. It sounds like a transmission from the future but was released in 1969 so it could actually have been played at the party.

Davidson Pearce was still going when I started in advertising. It was acquired by BMP in 1988, which was then itself acquired by DDB, creating BMP DDB Needham, now just known as DDB London. (Update: since this post was originally written, DDB London has changed name again, to become Adam & Eve DDB.)

I can't figure out how to embed the video on this blog, but it's well worth watching on Mr Curtis's site here.

"It's a wig, actually." Really?