Mad Men, worry not. 
Despite all this talk of traditional advertising being dead, and social, digital, web 2.0, new media blah, blah, blah, I am here to say with complete, absolute certainty that old-school advertising still works.
How do I know? My 3-year-old showed me in very simple terms.
Jake and I were prepping to leave for daycare the other day and, like always, Jake asked if I had my iPod. Frequent “Every Other Thursday” readers will recall that Jake likes his Ozzy and Ramones so I was expecting him to dream up some metal for the ride to Marblehead.
Instead, Jake threw a curve. “Do you have the ‘Wild Things Are’ song on your iPod?” he asked. Huh? Jake realized he missed something, said, “Do you have the ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ song?”
Quick calculus in my head led me to the ad we’ve all seen by now for the new movie of the famed children’s book. And the song featured in the trailer happens to be a favorite of mine, “Wake Up” by Arcade Fire.
Of course Daddy has that song, Jake, of course he does. So off to school we went, Arcade Fire blaring all the way.
But here’s the rub – Jake is indeed a Millennial. The TV he watches is at least 90 percent DVR’d or ‘On Demand.’ He and his older brother pretty much do not watch commercials. Sure, the random ad slips in but I can say with some authority that my kids do not see a lot of ads. And yet, the song slipped in. The ad stuck. And away goes Madison Avenue and a junior buyer is born.
This of course worries me. How on earth can we shield our kids from the rat-a-tat-tat of advertising when the ads seep through even if you’re not watching them? When he’s allowed, does this mean Jake would go running to iTunes and hit me up for 99 cents for whatever new song is in that trailer he likes? What happens when what he likes is the movie itself, a bike, a car, a house?
Well, at least he’s only three. We’ll worry about all that later.
For now, the good news out of this is that Jake is expanding his musical tastes beyond just metal, which Daddy likes.
Oh, and that Don Draper is securely employed for another generation.
Where The Wild Things Are
I’m actually feeling a bit more optimistic about this. It’s not that ads are getting more insidious, it’s that they are actually contributing to rather than disrupting the content in our entertainment. Think about it: the movie looks cool, the ad is cool, the song is cool – we enjoyed that. We’ll continue to block out that which we d not value in our media and include that which we do value. If Don Draper’s stuff is getting in it’s because we’re sympathetic to the message and delivery system.