If desire is the window to the soul, then advertisement is the key to open it. Advertisements can be a gentle push or a battering ram, forcibly opening the soul. Today, we’ll be looking at the former case, through Mad Men Season 1 Episode 13: The Wheel.
Emotions over Features: An Analysis of Draper’s Unorthodox Pitch
In the Kodak “Carousel” scene, Don Draper does something no real ad in the 1950s-1960s ever thought of doing: he starts with what people truly desire. Don’s carousel pitch, while not directly aligned with the client’s requirement in emphasis of “The Future”, “Research and Development”, and “The Wheel”, functions well as a clever reframing of the client’s tech-first demand into a desire-first value proposition aimed at Kodak executives and, by and large, the American families. By extension, Don’s proposal resolves the problem Duck mentioned: an object that doesn’t jam and has bells and whistles, by turning the pitch itself (dark room, slow advancing slide) into emotional proof, while acknowledging Kodak’s technical expertise.
The orchestration of nostalgia
The arrangement of the fictional ad is as follows:
- Acknowledging the technical aspects of the projector
- Introduce the big idea of the ad: nostalgia, thus elevating the advertisement to another plane.
- Backs up the big idea by visual proof of Don’s personal life, with the addition of the emotion behind Don’s tone.
- Reveals the change of name from “The Wheel” to “The Carousel”.
- Settle with an image of love, and end.
The entire pitch is done at a slow pace, in a with a dark room, soft click of the slide advance, and warm colors, essentially selling the nostalgia tone.
As we can see, Don structured the pitch deliberately to ensure he satisfies both his client and the intended audience of the ad, i.e., the American families. The message and theme lie in Don’s willingness to concede on Kodak’s technology (technology is a glittering lure) while pivoting the product from “The Wheel” to “The Carousel” and defining nostalgia as the product’s origin. As such, Mad Men has shown us again what it means to deliver a great advertisement, something that remains relevant in the modern age: acknowledging the audience's demands while elevating the motivation to purchase by reeling in what people most desire.
True to historical ads?
Let’s turn to a real historic advertisement for a moment. The above television ad features Kodak’s latest color slide projector: The Kodak 300 Slide Projector. The ad starts with Kodak showing the ease of portability of the projector by comparing it to a briefcase, and a woman is shown carrying the projector effortlessly. The narrator (in a deep and exciting tone) phrases it as the perfect way to show and enjoy the color slides that the people took last Summer. The narrator goes on to sell the projector’s features, such as easy-to-reach controls, wide-angle lens, readymagtic changer, and available automatic magazine type charger. The ad shows a couple happily watching their slides while the narrator sells the feature. The ad ends with the narrator asserting that the projector is good because it’s developed by Kodak. As such, we can see that the Kodak Projector focuses very much on its features like the portability, without explicitly tying in any emotional values to what the product can offer. This is further reinforced as we see another variant of the ad by Kodak, this time in print format, regarding the Instamatic camera:
Here, Kodak went with a unique way of selling their camera’s fast cartridge load. They did it by asserting that the time it takes for the reader to read the above sentence aloud, they can load the new Kodak Instamatic Camera instantly and automatically. This helped the user understand just how fast and important the Camera Cartridge load is, instead of saying the exact time range of the camera load in seconds.
Furthermore, we also see a middle-aged man happily taking pictures with the said camera, potentially implying no skills barriers needed in using the tech product and complementing the lower headline “SO IT’S EASIER THAN EVER... TO TAKE GOOD PICTURES!”. Notice how the arrangement differs from Draper’s pitch: it is done with a bold headline benefit, supported by copy & visual showing easy load, which leads to a Call to Action (CTA) of purchasing the said camera, rather than starting from nostalgia value and ending with love. While this print format showed a unique approach in advertising, it nevertheless still focuses on features and innovation, similar to the former Kodak Ad, and differs from the fictional ad Don delivers.
These ads are suitable for the historical era they’re in. The advertisement assumes an audience that is just learning to bring media into the home and is worried about practicality. So, these ads reassure that this will not be one more finicky, heavy piece of home equipment. What they don’t do, however, is make a big emotional claim about what remembering is for.
Put simply, Real 1950-1960s ads aimed at clarity and reassurance, while Draper’s pitch focuses on meaning and recognition.
And because recognition (that little shock of “oh, yes, that’s what this is really about”) is a stronger hook than reassurance, Draper’s pitch feels deeper.
“The Wheel” to “The Carousel”
One of the brilliant parts in the scene is the renaming move. The Kodak client came in, calling it “The Wheel” – likely due to their engineering mindset. It quite literally describes the object in the table, something that feels flat or bland to our modern taste.
Here, Draper renames it “The Carousel”, transitioning the product from engineering innovation to experience leisure. “Carousel” carries connotations of childhood, repetition, gentle motion, music, and, more importantly, returning to the same place again.
Looking back into the real ads naming and how they describe their ads with mechanism (e.g., “automatic slide projector,” “Instamatic camera”), we can see how ahead of time Draper is in the advertisement world. He gave the product a feeling, an emotional value to hold on to. That single decision moves the product from the “home equipment” frame into the “memories” frame.
This is also an anachronistic piece of the scene. The show is written in the 2000s, when creative directors have long been talking about “owning an emotional territory” or “selling the benefit, not the feature.” That language hasn’t surfaced much in the late 1950s. So, it can be said that the scene is less of a historical context reenactment and more a retro-projection of modern creative logic onto a period setting. In conclusion, Mad Men invites us to imagine a creative director who sees what others failed to see in his time, that these devices weren’t just appliances, they were memory machines. That’s the fantasy – and it’s a compelling one.
Sources
"The Wheel." Mad Men, season 1, episode 13, AMC, 18 October 2007. AMC+, www.amcplus.com."
1957 Commercial for Kodak 300 Slide Projector." Commercial for Kodak Projector. Internet Archive, 1957, www.archive.org/details/1957CommercialForKodak300SlideProjector.
"Kodak Instamatic Camera "With new Cartridge load instantly"Vintage Print Ad 1963." Print ad for Kodak’s Camera. Ebay, uploaded by FAAME us FINDS, 1964, https://www.ebay.com/itm/286207569193.
"Ansco: Anscomatic Slide Projector, 1950s-1960s." Commercial for Asnco's Projector. AdViews, circa 1950s–1960s, repository.duke.edu/dc/adviews/dmbb04209.