INNOVATION

This is a new era of engagement where brands are seeking a two-way conversation with their customers

MAD MEN is a HBO television series that follows the fortunes of Don Draper and his colleagues at the fictional New York advertising agency Sterling Cooper in the early 1960s. One reason it is so good is it captures the mood and atmosphere of the time perfectly: the clothes, the smoking, the subservience of women at home and at work. Draper, the anti-hero, is the agency's alpha male, a creative director with a dark secret whose life is slowly falling apart before our eyes.

In between dealing with a depressed wife, an affair with a major client and the suicide of his brother, Draper gets on with the day job of making ads for everyone from Lucky Strike cigarettes and Dr Scholl shoes, to Revlon lip stick and Richard Nixon's doomed 1960 presidential campaign.

Draper's handling of clients is legendary. We regularly see them enter his office demanding a new campaign and a big idea, and go away charmed by his wit and intimidated by the weight of his intellect.

The clients also know that, beyond the half dozen other advertising agencies lining Madison Avenue - such as J Walter Thompson, BBDO and Ogilvy - there is no option but to take what they're given. To get their products in front of the target audience, advertising, either on television or in print, is the only medium available.

Today's Mad Men would love to have that sort of power. Now advertising is just one of many different marketing options available to clients and the whole structure of the industry has changed.

The internet has undermined print advertising and multichannel television threatens to make the 30-second ad spot just as much a relic of the old world as Don Draper and his Sterling Cooper cronies.

The reasons for this decline in mass audience television are partly obvious. Multichannel television has entered the mainstream which has had a major impact on the way the medium is used as a communication tool for brands. The average rating of the top five American television shows in 1980 was 28 (source: Nielsen). If a show rated 20, it stood a good chance of being pulled off the air. By 1990, the average rating was down to a 19.

In 2000, it was 14 and in 2004 the average rating was seven. Across the world, mass television audiences are a thing of the past. In 1998, the number of programmes broadcast in the UK which reached an audience of over 15 million people was 250. In 2006 the number was four (source: WPP/Mindshare).

Today's generation of Don Drapers are faced with a far more cynical audience, capable of screening out their commercial messages, either psychologically or via new technology such as Sky Plus and other hard disk digital recorders.

As such we are no longer passive recipients of advertising which demands a change of approach: this is the era of engagement where brands are seeking a two-way conversation with their customers.

After 50 years of shouting at us to buy cigarettes, cars and toilet paper, ad agencies - as any monopoly would - have found the transition difficult. An example of how difficult got an airing this month. If this is the type of "conversation" we can expect, God help us.

"Random Acts of Cheetos", or Raoc, is the big idea from Frito Lay, the PepsiCo owned crisps and snack food giant, designed to work across several platforms and on many levels. And it stinks. On every platform, and on every level.

A viral video encourages us to 'stick it to the man', or put another way, think of ways of using the orange crisp-based snacks to rise up against figures of authority, such as teachers, the boss, parents or just anyone we don't like. Then, when we've put Cheetos in to our mum's white wash or vandalised a colleague's laptop, we are asked to post the video to orangeunderground.com, where the high jinks can be enjoyed by the rest of the crisp eating "community".

You've got to hand it to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the San Francisco based 'creative' agency that sold the idea - they knew a sucker when they saw one.

You just know that further down the road is a plan to create a Cheetos social network, on the lines of Facebook or MySpace, or to commission a Banksy style series of Cheetos-themed works, blurring the lines between art, graffiti and crisps.

From there they'll move to align the Cheetos brand with Dadaism, suggesting that by eating snacks that smell we are as one with those who believed the reason and logic of bourgeois capitalist society had led to the 1914-1918 war and who expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that embraced chaos and irrationality.

I'm not against kids doing stupid stuff, honest. But I just wish today's Mad Men could be more like Don Draper.