Do you want to work for Don Draper?

If you’re asking “who’s Don Draper?” you’ve been missing out on the latest TV (box set) phenomenon that is Mad Men. Mad Men is a fictional drama series about an ad agency during the halcyon advertising years of the sixties on New York’s iconic Madison Avenue. Following such luminaries such as The Sopranos and The Wire, Mad Men has been setting the DVD box set world alight. It has just made its much anticipated return for a fifth series on TV after a hiatus of 18 months. 

Advertising has been a labour of love for me for many years. As an 18 year old student I used to flick through Campaign (the trade magazine) dreaming of working in an agency in Charlotte Street (London’s equivalent of Madison Avenue). This was on the back of the golden age for advertising in the UK – the meteoric rise of Saatchi & Saatchi, BBH’s famous Levi’s ads, CDP’s Hamlet baldy man in a photo booth. I achieved my ambition, not in London’s Charlotte Street but in Belfast and Dublin and have continued my love for the sexiest part of the marketing mix ever since.

So you can imagine my enthusiasm when I first heard of Mad Men. Interestingly my wife is a huge fan of the programme as well, but it’s more to do with Jon Hamm who plays the lead character Don Draper, the suave, philandering, creative director of the agency. So not only did we mark the new series first episode date in our calendar, I also became a fan of the Mad Men Facebook page.

Yesterday I got a news feed on Facebook asking me if I wanted to do a job interview with Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. How could I refuse? I clicked on the link and was taken to a Mad Men microsite. Once I arrived, I found all sorts of interesting things for Mad Men nerds like myself – blogs, episode guides, interviews and behind the scenes videos (although the videos can’t be watched outside the US, tut tut). The network behind the series, AMC, are making full use of social media to attach me to the programme’s marketing communications. My interview involved seven characters from the series asking me questions in relation to their department to which I had multiple choice answers.

Anyway the long winded point behind all of this is that using a job interview as a game is a clever way to draw people into the Mad Men microsite. It proves that everyone has an interest in job interviews whether for fun or as a helpful reference. We’ve actually developed our own online interview game called the Hays Challenge which gives you a snapshot of what it’s like to be a Hays Recruitment Consultant. It’s a bit of fun but also a light hearted test to see if you’d be interested in finding the right person to transform a company.

Oh and how did I get on in my Mad Men job interview? I was told I was hired as a copywriter at SCDP!

If only…..