» What we can, as creative professionals, learn from Don Draper | EverydayUX: Everyday User Experience by alex rainert

+ What we can, as creative professionals, learn from Don Draper

Chris Fahey recently wrote a post, “The wisdom of Don Draper,” that I bet many of us who work at interactive agencies and share a fondness for Mad Men have, at one point or another, thought about writing.

Don Draper is certainly not without his faults (and there are many) but to see him at work is really a site to behold. Chris does a great job of capturing why here:

Why did I follow don_draper in the first place? Because as a creative professional — even though I work in a (slightly) different industry and even though it’s 45 years later — I find his character absolutely inspiring and thought provoking. And a good deal of my fascination revolves around his professional skills and talents.

So what is it about Don Draper? In the first episode of season 2, Draper’s boss Roger Sterling tries to explain to a colleague, “Duck” Phillips, what Don Draper is all about. Sterling tells Duck, “Imagine he knows everything you do about this business but thinks like a child.”

Indeed, Don Draper the philandering husband is certainly childish in his tendency to always indulge his immediate desires. But Sterling was talking about Draper’s ability to see advertising as an emotional appeal, based on our most basic childlike emotions of love, safety, desire, and fear. Draper’s gift is his ability to understand these emotions while being a cunning businessman and a strong leader. He finds people’s emotional buttons and presses them, whether it’s understanding the hearts of his client’s customers, tapping into his own clients’ fears, coaching (or disciplining) his team, or drawing on his own pain and heartache — or all of these at the same time — he is able to devise, over and over again, advertising creative strategies that are simultaneously calculated and heartfelt.

I added the bold for emphasis because I think that line in particular captures what we strive for in our lives as creative professionals. You don’t want the industry vet who’s incapable of breaking boundaries and you don’t want the Pollyanna creative who has no grounding in reality. That is precisely what makes Draper’s character so good at what he does and you have to give credit to the amazing writers of the show for capturing it in such an imaginative, yet precise, way.

Check out his whole post here.

PS: Chris alludes to forthcoming posts about our favorite Creative Director so if this is something that interests you, I highly recommend you keep up with what’s going on over at Graphpaper.com.