Listen
I have lived and worked for 28 years in and around the media in New York City . So, I know one or two advertising executive. But, either my life or Hollywood 's version of city life is out of whack because according to TV and the movies about half of all urban professionals are advertising executives.
On Friends, Which is still running hours a day in re-runs, Chandler is the funny ad executive. On the current Showtime series Queer as Folk, the character Brian is an ad executive, just as 35 or 40 years ago on Bewitched , Darren was an ad executive. In fact, although Bewitched was about a witch masquerading as an ordinary housewife, it was also about advertising near the end of its swinging, mid-century Golden Age. Bewitched portrayed the ad world as high-strung and disingenuous and absurd.
In feature films, there are a few iconic satires of the ad world, like Putney Swope from 1969, and, 20 years later, the British movie How to Get Ahead in Advertising .
Advertising as a business is almost always portrayed in at least somewhat comic fashion. Starting after World War II, good-looking men of a certain extremely Caucasian kind were pegged in the movies as ad executives – like Cary Grant in Mr. Blandings , and Cary Grant in North by Northwest and Jack Lemmon in at least three of his comedies: Good Neighbor Sam, The Prisoner of 2nd Avenue, and The Out of Towners.
Maybe the fact that so many people in charge of Hollywood grew up watching Bewitched and Jack Lemmon movies accounts for the current glut. I swear, it's the rare romantic comedy nowadays where one of the stars doesn't play an ad executive. Like Mel Gibson in What Women Want . And How to Lose A Guy In Ten Days , Kate & Leopold and Bounce and a dozen other recent romantic comedies that I have seen on airplanes the last couple of years.
For 50 years now the movies have used “advertising executive” as easy shorthand for pointless ambition and superficial glamour, for glib, existentially hollow yuppie life. And so, in romantic comedies, ad executives are inevitably primed to fall in love with somebody who forces them to reassess their existentially hollow yuppie lives and the pointless ambition and superficial glamour it entails. In other words, in screenplays, movie executives and screenwriters opt for “advertising executive” instead of making their heroes “movie executives” and “screenwriters.”
But advertising is much, much more than the default profession for stock comedy characters.
In fact, ads are the most ubiquitous and maybe the most influential cultural artifacts on the planet. And very occasionally they're even artful and powerful, like that amazing TV ad a couple of years ago, called “Cog,” that featuring a Honda disassembled and turned into a Rube Goldberg contraption, or all those gorgeous European advertising posters in the first half of the 20th century.
It's also no coincidence that the 20th century is when those luxuries we call art and entertainment proliferated with the creation of mass media and mass markets and million-dollar paintings.
Art and advertising are siblings.
