james_nicoll

Hours of research into back issues of MAD magazine have convinced me that the doings of Madison Avenue were the focus of the greatest cultural obsession of the age.

When my brother and I were little kids visiting our grandparents' farmhouse, we found a chest in the attic full of MAD Magazines, left there by my uncle when he went off to college. It was the complete run from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, and we took them back home and read them over and over. As a result we got an unconscious education in the pop culture and political worldview of that time. For me, the first few seasons of Mad Men were a huge exercise in "Aha! Look there! I know what that must be!!!" I haven't enjoyed the show nearly as much since it moved on from the age of beatniks and three-martini lunches.

I remember now, and I can't think where it was from, the claim that the Advertising Executive occupied the American cultural position which has since the 70s been taken over by the Financial Genius. That is, it's the person, typically a young male executive, who's got this mildly exotic office job where there's just oceans of cash washing around in great tidal waves, which a creative or imaginative or focus-driven person can grab hold of and use to make a godzillion dollars by the time he's thirty, one of intense competitive energies and incredible pressures, where all sorts of nutty people will be forgiven their eccentricity because they Make Lots Of Money.

(Expanding on that, there's also how they're both in fields that Capitalism's Truest Believers insist are essential to the economy, even though we might ask whether we really need, say, the geniuses who brought us Collateralized Debt Obligations or the Why I Love World Wide Wickets In 25 Words Or Less contest.)

Anyway, somewhere around the 70s the person who made money coming up with fresh jingles and dramatic poster art got replaced with the person who made money coming up with ways to turn every stock into a bond, every bond into a fund, and every fund into a stock again.

And then there's the Dot-Com Billionaire. Google is basically Madison Avenue in Cyberspace, though the ad conduits that actually collect the money are the unglamorous part.

The Space Merchants, no?

There were another roughly 2,038,448,561,345,992,450,124,483,118,593 Science Fiction Versus Madison Avenue stories written between mid-1952 and late 1952.

The Space Merchants and The Tunnel Under The World are the only ones that anyone can still stand, though.

I remember "Year Day", a Kuttner/Moore short story where selling protection from being bombarded by ads is a lucrative business, as being pretty good. It was published in 1953 though, so maybe it doesn't count.

-- Paul Clarke

And fifty years later, people were making money selling spam filters. Prediction successful!

OK, just how many Madison Avenue-related SF stories were there back in the 1950s? Am I going find Don Draper hawking cough medicine on Mars?

There were a lot.

I wouldn't have thought very many of them were made into radio dramas, but there is "The Tunnel under the World" out there someplace.

That was the first X Minus One I listened to.

Ah.

In his blow-off letter to commercial sf at the turn of the ‘60s, “Don’t Call Us”, Donald Westlake lists all the reasons why his uncompleted sf novel won’t be acceptable to the various magazines, including “it isn’t a silly satire about a world controlled by advertising agencies or insurance companies or the A&P so it can’t be serialised in Galalaxy magazine”.
So Galaxy really was seen to have become a cliché on this matter at that time.
An interesting point might be, who was writing these stories from personal experience in Madison Avenue and who was just leaping on the band wagon and making a few extrapolations from general knowledge and so just contributing to recycling all the same-old assumptions.

- matthew davis

An interesting point might be, who was writing these stories from personal experience in Madison Avenue and who was just leaping on the band wagon and making a few extrapolations from general knowledge and so just contributing to recycling all the same-old assumptions.

There's a solid master's thesis in that.