Mad Men in the Caves of Lescaux

There are no fat people in Egyptian hieroglyphics making the walls of the Pyramids the first editions of Vanity Fair. The Caves of Lescaux feature 364 horses, a veritable car lot for prehistoric transportation.

So simple even a Caveman can buy Geico insurance. Or from a Gecko. Or from Kash, the googly-eyes sitting on a band of money.

Let’s hand it to the Mad Men at the Martin Agency.

And let’s remember Leo Burnett, at whose eponymous agency were developed the Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Marlboro Man and Tony the Tiger.

Visual icons have been compelling sales for centuries.

Like those three hung spheres of the pawn broker that originated from the Renaissance House of Lombard.

This then is the real legacy of Don Draper, not the haunted childhood of a Depression-era birth that led to the development of line extensions for London Fog given the saturated American market for rain coats.

Advertising symbols and iconography have been with us since the dawn of commerce.

A show like Mad Men taps into the modern sensibility of irony of both the commercial and home work place as well as the creation of advertising commerce. This sense of irony is centuries old. My former professor, Wayne Booth, at the University of Chicago, published A Rhetoric of Irony that illustrated this skein of observation and characterization, even those sometimes those ironies lack a stable referent.

However, for predecessors of the modern anguish and anxieties of Geico’s caveman, you don’t have to look any further than Tony the Tiger or the Jolly Green Giant.

In 1956, Burnett said that advertising did its best work by impression, and he encouraged his staff to identify those symbols, those visual archetypes, that would leave consumers with a "brand picture engraved on their consciousness."

Now, if we really want to go further back to when the Jolly Green Giants and Tigers roamed the earth, we can rest in the Caves of Lescaux, where like Plato’s Cave, horses were hawked like Fords on Friday Nights.

Le plsu c’est meme, le plus c’est change. The way in which you view the world may change, but the way of the world doesn’t. Let’s all enjoy a new season of Mad Men and pay tribute to a commercial nature that has never gone out of fashion.