Especially close side ring she derailed her career because he said they were moving to Los Angeles. She would never have been a great actress but she’d have had steady work in the soap.
Whilst I do agree, she got her first break. Being Don's wife because he got her the commercial
That was the catalyst
No Don, no career.
They were both toxic but the Megan sympathisers irk me.
Her mother was right, she was entitled and wanted it all without working for it.
Thaaaank youuuu! I severely dislike Megan and all the love for her on this subreddit baffles me. I often don't voice this, but I'm 100% team Betty. She's so flawed but willingly takes the L on lung cancer? Fucking tragic bruh. The literal definition of tragic. I love Betty because of her flaws, where as Megan? Thank you, next.
I like the moment when Harry is talking to Don in that episode and mentions how stupid a decision it was for. That’s when Don realizes he really owes her
When Don suggested a move to LA, Megan jumped at it. She said there have been a whole host of opportunities out west that she had never considered because of their roots in NYC. So while Don totally screwed her and their marriage by changing his mind last minute, I wouldn't say he bears culpability for her pursuit of and failure in an acting career in Cali. And as others mentioned, her NYC soap job happened because of the commercial gig for which Don helped get her foot in the door.
Especially when you consider he is probably one of the most attractive men on the planet. Yes, his being an emotionally unavailable, cheating, horrible jerk is irresistible. Why am I so attracted to that type of man? I'm not the only woman like this. What is it that makes the worst possible person (that we know from the start is bringing nothing but heartbreak), so incredibly appealing?
You asking us? I dunno maybe try to work on your issues if a toxic piece of shit of a person can still be irresistible to you based solely on his looks.
I was married to someone who made Don look like a rosy cheeked Boy Scout. I had to pay him a huge sum of money after the divorce settlement, despite all the abuse. Following that train of logic I was due an 8 or 9 figure settlement…
Something about men like that. I don't know what it is. I'm aware of how horrible they are, but those are the guys that create the butterflies (which I believe is actually my brain warning me against that person) that I can't resist.
Great point! Thank you, and I have read about that. It's definitely helpful. I think I'm attracted to that kind of guy more when things in my life are unstable or at their lowest.
Because they don't agree? She deserved something for him derailing her career but that's a lot of money. Especially because she never stopped pursuing it in California while living off his money. If anything he financially supported her career.
TBF, she thought going to California was good for her career. She said she'd been turning down opportunities there because she didn't think Don would want to go.
So yeah, she quit her job because he said they were moving, but she only considered it a bad idea later.
Because it’s insane- it suggests that a judge may levy a monetary fine on someone for not being a “good husband” or “good wife” which is seriously troubling
Did I mention lost opportunities?
And in my jurisdiction, moral damages no longer exist - they are archaic in the US
Huge in Italy though and some catholic countries
Do you actually think that if my wife cheated on me, in a no-fault divorce state- that I could sue her for moral damages? Do you think that’s how the laws work in no-fault states?
She did deserve a compensation, but 1 million was way too much. She was a simple naive girl, she probably ended up dying of an overdose or joining a Charlie Manson type cult and dumping all her money into that closely after.
I watched "The Day of the Jackal" (1973) recently where the assassin asks for half a million dollars to kill the president of France, and all the conspirators fall off their chairs going "are you crazy?!" - So cute nowadays.
I love when people say I would never want to be a Harry or a Pete. Or even Don. Yes the fuck yoh do. It’s so idiotic, take Harry for example he’s living in such a higher tax bracket than majority of ppl. The mad men lived in a different world, they are all living in money. When they complain about not making ends meet they mean they can’t buy that 2000$ dinner because they have to pay rent on a MANHATTAN apartment. Oh also they all have nice ass automobiles.
Like having a family as most of these men do in lavish apartments/houses and amenities? You can be in someone like Harry’s circumstances and make different life choices. I’m pointing out how the writers laid out the cast. Don isn’t some alpha jock with his crew consisting of roger and the rest of the men are incel virgins. All of them are getting women, money, living the high life. Lots of people will flat out say we don’t want to be Harry but never really look at his life
They’re at a NYC professional services firm with Fortune 500 clients. What do you think people are making at big law firms, consulting firms, etc today?
Still the case with advertising though? I know a few former classmates who work in advertising and I'd say they earn below average compared to the rest of the cohort who went into other fields, but we're in a different country. Maybe it's different in the US/New York.
The ad agency model is built on junior creatives getting over worked and under paid while the account execs and directors are the one making more money. It’s sorta why the agency model has been on the decline into the 21st century.
I was lucky enough to start my copywriting career in the 1990s, beginning at regional shops (in Seattle), then moving to national agencies in San Francisco and LA. This coincided with the dotcom boom, before Google or many of the results metrics were available. Perhaps the last golden age of advertising.
I'm commenting to show how lucrative advertising could be, back when people watched TV, read newspapers and magazines, and used mostly dialup internet.
My salary history in 2024 dollars, over the course of 12 years (age 23-35).
* First job: Junior level, regional direct mail shop, shit creative reputation - $46K
* Second job: Mid level, regional full service agency, OK reputation - $65K. *I produced some good work here, nothing earth shattering.*
* Third job: Mid level, regional full service, better reputation - $90K. *Client switched agencies, requested they hire me. Didn't work here long but I got a few things for my book.*
* Fourth job: Mid level, big national agency, top-tier creative reputation - $57K. *Took a pay cut for the chance to work at a top shop, won a few national awards, eventually got laid off.*
* Fifth job: Senior/ACD, smaller shop, spinoff of my previous agency- $192K. *Worked here for 3 years, strong TV reel, but left after the dotcom bust and also because I hated LA.*
I took time off to have kids, freelanced a bit, and then fell into medical/pharma where I work on the client side to this day. I'm 53 and make about the same as I did in my mid 30s, but I sorta aged out of advertising.
It's much harder to have a career like this nowadays, for many reasons. But it used to be kind of a gold mine, and not just for the SCDPs of the world,
You need to be very good with the weasel words, and legal needs to approve your copy. I'd have to mark it up in accordance with their marketing claims matrices (basically a spreadsheet showing the permitted language, and scientific backup). Also a lot of boilerplate; sometimes a whole extra page worth, or the majority of the TV script.
Concepts are usually very watered down, too. But on the flip side, I find it interesting to write about medical topics.
It's a bit of a niche in the copy world, though, because of all the legal constraints.
It's not a literal thing. But it speaks to the fact ad agencies rarely hire ppl in their 40s and up, except for upper management roles.
But if you're looking for a senior copywriter/art director/ACD job, it becomes harder as you approach your 40s and virtually impossible in your 50s.
So many of us go for client-side jobs after a certain age, e.g. age out.
Advertising is bigger than ever it’s just that the advertising companies are tech companies now. Google is an advertising company. They basically do what Harry Crane did.
The low level folks (coordinators, analysts, etc) aren’t making much comparatively. The executive and c-suite people (who are more comparable to the people we follow in Mad Men) do just fine.
Not at all. Besides top executives, advertising salaries are low compared to other professional services. This is especially true for creative roles.
With so much consolidation under the large ad holding companies, salaries have stayed consistently low in order to win clients with rock bottom prices.
Last really big salaries in advertising were in the 90s, some of them early 00s. I have a friend who is a VP in a big firm in NYC and she makes around USD300K a year, plus some bonuses. It is A LOT, but she is a VP and it is NYC.
Yeah but you’re not comparing to the specific role that Ken had. If you’re looking at like a copywriter then of course they will earn less.
Also advertising has changed a lot since the 50s so the role of the account executive is much different now.
> would be *paid* $500,000 up
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
New York lawyers (even the partners) work 100 hour weeks reading and drafting some of the most tedious documents known to mankind. Don shows up at the office at 10am to get wasted on whiskey and proffer forth some pop-psychology truisms, before heading off to dinner. Yes there are occasional moments of genius from him, and occasional late nights and weekends, but he is grossly overpaid for the work he does. There's a reason advertising is no longer like that any more.
I don't know, never known anyone who lived there. You'd have to make good money though to afford it.
If 1 bedroom apartments are $1200 here and our median pay is 57k.
They probably pay McDonalds workers 50k in NYC.
min wage workers here make roughly 30k/year. median rent in manhattan is like 4500 so service workers live in outer boroughs and have roommates, get lucky and win the affordable housing lottery, or live with family who have held on to the same rent stabilized apartment since the 70s and pay crazy low rent. But they have to make it possible to make it work somehow. Even if most of manhattan is a luxury theme park for finance bros, they still need the rest of us to staff it.
The situation is even worse when you regard other cost of living details. Things like Peggy’s townhouse, Pete’s apartment were $25k, $30k in the mid-60’s. Even Don’s penthouse was allegedly $55k.
Which would be about 10X that value adjusted for inflation. But actually, that penthouse would probably be closer to $10M today. Don’s house in Ossining was maybe $30k, about $320k today, but actually closer to $800k in the current market.
Yeah the real estate thing is a good example of how you can’t just punch a dollar value into a CPI calculator.
This series takes place during the white flight era, when the population of NYC declined as many residents fled for suburbia. The population declined from 7.78 million in 1960 to 7.07 million in 1980, and many of the people who fled to the suburbs were wealthier.
This had the effect of severely depressing the value of NYC real estate. Not too many people who could afford a Manhattan penthouse actually wanted to live there.
And of course recently real estate has appreciated much faster than core inflation, with the NYC real estate market being especially hot for much of the past 30 years.
At a certain point we can’t figure out what the 2024 USD equivalent should be everything and just have to go along with the story.
Did a project in undergrad and one of the findings that came out of it was that since the “tax revolt” of the 1970s in states like California that gave rise to economic policies championed by Reagan in the 80s, two things coincide:
1. Union participation has declined.
2. Wages, adjusted for inflation, stagnated.
3. Worker productivity exploded (thanks in part to gains in technology).
Effectively, the American worker has not received a raise since the 1970s.
This reminds of an article I bookmarked some years back. [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/)
If you look at what was happening in the late 60s/70s in the US, our economy was beginning to encounter trouble because Europe and Japan had rebuilt by then and they were outcompeting us.
The US had an artificially boosted economy from the mid 40s to the late 1960s because all of our industrial competition conveniently spent the last 7 years destroying each other’s industrial base. That left the US as the only game in town for a while.
Not only did our factories run at full capacity to produce weapons, but those weapons were used to blow up our competition’s factories. By the mid 1940s Germany, France, England, Italy, Russia, and Japan were pretty much out of commission.
So they had to rebuild from the ground up. But once they did, they had modern factories and our older factories could no longer compete. On top of that, their economies were depressed while ours was at an all-time high. This put our exports at a disadvantage compared to poorer nations.
To further complicate matters, the deferred social benefits that companies offered during the Great Depression/WW2 when we didn't have money were beginning to bite us in the ass. We had people retiring with generous retirement pensions that just weren’t sustainable.
Obviously this has a ripple effect in our politics.
Don't forget fiat currency + loose fiscal and monetary policy = capital aggregation in the parts of the economy that readily access newly minted cash (aka banks)
Their critical war factories, yeah. But they still had to rebuild their own country after the war. The Western side of it was pretty well destroyed.
They also didn't seem to do much trade in the open market. They serviced their satellite states, but I never remember seeing any Soviet stuff here in the US.
This is true. Similarly also to how the British didn't really suffer massive infrastructure damage either but did suffer disproportionate population losses + massive wealth depletion + the loss of traditionally essential economic bases in the accelerated wave of post-colonial decolonization.
Union participation declined as manufacturing as a percentage of the economy decline, not really related to policy.
Service sectors have not traditionally had unions and most people are service workers today.
[You are full of shit.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q)
Edit: Look at the chart, you dolts. Median real wages keep going up. Sorry to break up the circlejerk.
That data doesn’t look like it accounts for inflation though. It’s just based on surveyed citizens one what they make weekly (adjusted if they self report hourly or monthly or whatnot)
Ah I didn’t know what CPI was, I looked it up and get it now.
It’s also a poll of people 16 and up and minimum wage going up is going to be a big part of that on that most recent spike (which will further push the cost of living up too.) That really didn’t help anyone in the long run
Minimum wage has little to do with it. Almost nobody makes that. Also, if it did, why would it matter?
Have you considered that, if you didn’t even know what CPI is, that you have no idea what you’re taking about?
I wasn’t even disagreeing with you, I was asking about the data set and trying to learn about something I’m not terribly familiar with. Have you considered you’re an unreasonably miserable human being?
If anything this cohort of people is richer. They might not be working in advertising anymore, but the Sterling/Coopers of the world tend to find themselves in industries that pay well that they can nepo themselves into.
The average creative director in NYC makes anywhere between $150K and $200K. That's average, so median is most likely slightly lower. A farcry away from Don's $5MM adjusted for inflation
He's also not just any creative director. He was one of the most sought after. I'd agree that his salary numbers aren't realistic, but the top dogs are making 7 figures.
I was saying **adjusted for inflation** Don was making 5M a year. He made several hundred thousand dollars a year from salary and bonuses, which adjusted for inflation is a few million. Don netted approximately $3M in 1970 dollars from the McCann buyout, that's around $20M in today's dollars.
Don wrote Megan a check for $1 million in 1960's dollars like it was nothing. Dude had infinite money
It's a high salary, but it's New York and he's working with giant corporate clients. It wouldn't be strange to be pulling $200k in Ken's shoes today at an ad agency.
And remember Ken is a golden boy: other people (Harry) are shocked by his salary, he's promoted a year later to Head of Accounts. He's got to be one of the best-compensated account guys at the firm.
Also keep in mind that the "advertising industry" has changed a lot since the 1960s: major agencies aren't the only places that higher well-paid ad executives. Tech is largely funded by ad dollars--someone like Ken might be managing major corporate advertising accounts for Facebook, and making a hell of a lot more than $215,000.
Tbf she bought a rundown old brownstone that was converted into two apartments, in a terrifying neighborhood. It’d be like buying in the South Bronx or Newark today, which she probably could do.
Before, she was looking at a 2br condo on the UES that was a hike from the subway, which is maybe above her 2024 price range but not *obscenely* so. (She’d probably be in a 1br now.) New York was always expensive.
That's not far off. At all.
An account man working a role like kens would also be able to do that or more today. He had some of their main accounts in his portfolio.
I'm an account manager and I'll do around 250k this year. Many in the "high end" of the business can clear 300-500k / year.
Don getting 5 million usd in a merger where he is name partner? Yes. That fits pretty well.
I spent so long making barely anything. Didnt break 50k until 2022.
My Dad was telling me I'd be able to live easy on 77k, as he was making that in 1999.
I told him that would be like me making almost double what I do now and he didn't believe me.
Trust me, I'm grateful here in Florida to make what I make with just a HS diploma.
My gf has a college degree in Biology and makes $20.50 an hour. They pay us so poorly here.
You realize that most of the characters on Mad Men went to schools you used to get in if you had the right family and got their jobs from their wealthy networks, right? This is a show about rich people and they exist now as well as they did then.
And 77k + $20.50 an hour aren’t terrible in Florida. It’s just that these people were doing quite a bit better than “not terrible”.
All of what you're saying here is accurate, but you seem to be missing key points.
This is a show about some of the highest paying jobs in the US in the 60s. Madison Avenue ad men are used as a lens into that time for a reason.
Of course you're not going to be making as much as they are without a high school diploma. But plenty of similar jobs in NYC are still making that type of money.
I don't think you have any clue what I do. And you appear pretty sour.
I don't have any people reporting to me. I don't care how fast my colleagues finish their work, only my own work matters..
I don't do any kind of dinners or trips or anything like that. I'm on-site at my customers, advising how to apply my products when and if it makes sense. And apparently I do a good job, because they pay me handsomely and my customers like me.
Once you start working with large enterprise and get a high budget, you also get a good salary. I am responsible for the 50 largest accounts in my country + our largest resellers and a handful of mid-sized.
A lot of people are saying that things weren’t really much better back then, and that people didn’t have much more money, but explain something to me:
I have a 2 Cub Cadet tractors from the late 60s/early 70s. Those things were everywhere back then, very popular tractors.
They cost about $1200 back in 1970. That would be nearly $10,000 today. Nobody is going to spend that kind of money for a garden tractor nowadays.
Or similarly, people bought the original Atari 2600 for $189 back in 1977. It was a very popular video game system. In today’s dollars it would be like $950. A video game that cost that much wouldn’t be a popular product, but it was then.
You are not thinking of this correctly. When my parents bought their 19" TV I had as a child in the mid-70's it cost $400 then. That's almost $3,000 in today's dollars. And my dad says that's what it felt like. It was a major purchase. When they bought the speakers for their stereo before I was born they were $600. That's about $5000 today. That was also a major purchase that they spent a long time paying off. My folks were not affluent. That's just what it cost to buy regular made-in-America items those days that were made with 100% manual labor and little automation. A Schwinn Paramount 10-speed bike cost $299 in 1970. That's $2,500 today.
For items that are not limited buy supply--Scotch whisky, fine art, etc--there's no point in human history where material goods cost less than they do now. In 1880 an hour of light in your home required about three hours of labor to buy. Today it's about one second of labor to get one hour of light.
Things that DO cost a lot more are things that require a lot of human inputs--stone carving on buildings, for example, or any other masonry. Most of the people who have the skills to do masonry work are engineers now. You can't build the Empire State building out of carved limestone if you're paying each worker $150,000 a year. Same for things that are service intensive. Agatha Christie wrote that when she was pregnant her and her husband planned to get a *second* *full time live in servant* to work as a nanny, but she couldn't conceive of buying a car. Those were for rich people. Similarly, my dad as a middle manager type for the state of Michigan in the 80's *had his own secretary*. How else was he going to mail meeting schedule notification letters to ten people? Type them on a typewriter himself?
I did this too with the kid Harry Crane hired as script reader. I remember it being shockingly a lot for an entry level job, the description of which is very similar to the position I started off on TV, though I got paid significantly less.
Anyway, here is a copy paste:
__________
Set in 1962, "A Night to Remember" is Mad Men's 2nd season's 8th Episode.
A character is brought on as a new hire for a new department created for the growing medium of Television. He's paid $150 a week for what amounts to an entry level job - he in fact replaces the head of personelle, who's doing the job of "Script Reader" temporarily, without much training. Light duty, but a bit of a time suck, the job requires reading television scripts, noting the themes, and ensuring compatibility with which commercials to air. Eg: if someone is dying of lung cancer on the show, you can't show cigarette ads.
How much is 1962's $150 (or $3.75 an hour assuming 40hr workweek) worth today in 2023? Using an American inflation calculator=
$1,534.96/week
Or around $38.37/hour
Or almost $80,000 a year.
I looked at indeed.Com and found that entry level jobs in TV and or advertising in NYC land you $48k to $60k. There's variability, but $80k is for managerial positions with experience and or more skilled jobs like writing and producing. Let's be generous and say you're actually getting $65k or $31/hr
So far, a bit disappointing in that it proves wages have fallen behind inflation. But let's look at other costs.
In 1962, US avg is $0.29 US gal.
Only 7.7% of that Mad Men hourly wage.
Right now gas in NYC is $3.87 US gal.
Or 12.5% of of our hourly example entry level salary.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/14696209@N02/3879042350
In 1962, this is a McDonald's menu.
$0.15 for cheeseburger.
Let's get two in case portions were smaller back then= 30c or 8% of our hourly wage.
A big Mac in NY today is $5.23 or 16.9% of the 31 an hour salary.
Housing in NYC has gotten insane and even historically cheap neighbourhoods have been gentrified, thus proving that everything is out of reach for anyone just entering the workforce, even with post secondary.
So let's look at cars.
A 1962 vette was stickered at $4,038.
Or 51.8% of the annual salary of our Madison Ave script reader.
Today, a coupe Stingray is about 65k
Or 100% of the salary of our imaginary NYC TV/advert lackey.
_________
So, fuck modern life, right?
To the salaried employee entering the workforce today, the buying power of their wage is literally half that of their silent generation /elder boomer grandparents.
It should be noted that this show isn’t reality, and with some of the salaries they aren’t totally accurate. For instance Pete says his salary in season one and it’s way too low for what he would have actually made.
A bunch of my friends work in advertising in NYC and they all make more than Ken’s inflation take-home. This is a show about wealthy NYC professionals, many with Ivy League degrees, and those people are still very well compensated.
It is crazy indeed how on CPI index it is a 10x thing.
But it’s also not exactly that simple. Using such an inflation index purely impacts general buying power as a whole. Higher ticket things like real estate doesn’t hold to the 10x exactly. Taxes were much different for higher incomes of the day back then too.
Just some examples. The general 10x rule is illustrative but doesn’t tell the full story.
That said you used the Ken example and I always felt that wasn’t even really realistic for the time. The equivalent of $200k plus annual today shouldn’t apply to any account man not the head of accounts. Unless it included commissions and he was just killing it.
Mad Men is a show about rich people. If they made it today Peggy would be making $200-250k, the partners would be millionaires, Roger is probably worth $100 million, Cooper $250 million, something along those lines.
Edit: Mad Men is a show about the 1%, I guess people don't realize that.
A lot of people are saying that things weren’t really much better back then, and that people didn’t have much more money, but explain something to me:
I have a 2 Cub Cadet tractors from the late 60s/early 70s. Those things were everywhere back then, very popular tractors.
They cost about $1200 back in 1970. That would be nearly $10,000 today. Nobody is going to spend that kind of money for a garden tractor nowadays.
Or similarly, people bought the original Atari 2600 for $189 back in 1977. It was a very popular video game system. In today’s dollars it would be like $950. A video game that cost that much wouldn’t be a popular product, but it was then.
Seem like higher wages then / against inflation now, but with the high tax brackets back in the 60s Ken was getting pumped. Would Don not have been on a 70% tax for 500k? If it was pre-64 / 90%!
I wonder how much the other partners are making in the merger because they make it seem like Don is the only one making money and is richer than everyone else.
In those days 99% of familles had only one salary to live on.
Since women got into the work force à lot of families have two revenues and are willing to both take a little less and still live good.
There was a race to lower the salaries since if you had two instead of one you could out compete the single salary people.
That's why today it's almost unthinkable to have a family on single salary since you have to earn twice as much to be on the same level.
>Don getting 500k for the mergers would be equivalent to getting 5 million today.
Now check what executives actually get today in such a situation. Executive pay has well out paced inflation.
Are you an account executive on Madison Avenue? I bet account execs these days make 215k in New York. The ones I work with in the ad-tech industry actually make much more than that
Edit: OP doesn’t have a college degree. He should be comparing his salary to Adam Whitman not Ken Cosgrove
As everyone else is saying, they are highly paid professionals and similar positions today exist. A successful account executive will easily be making 200+ thousand. Don was the sole creative director and a partner. He would also radio y be making mid 6 figures as a salary as well as equity payouts as bonuses or when a company is sold. Also the most important aspect is that your take-home pay is significantly higher today even if the inflated amount is less because people were paying up to 90% in income taxes up to the 80s until the Reagan tax cuts. 200k -90% = 20k take home. Your 77k is taking home much much. Probably around 55-60k depending on location.
Ibwish we could have those tax rates again. Think of how great things would be with all that money for social programs.
We could have government run ISP's, Healthcare, infrastructure, paid parental leave.
And it's funny on a show like Mad Men. People like this were responsible for reshaping our society into the ultimate consumers.
Behind Bert Cooper's sweet old man look is the shows most dangerous man.
The ultra rich who buy influence and lobby governments.
Ken is an accounts guy, and a good one.
Successful salespeople are generally among the best paid, as they are bringing in the dollars and every company needs money.
$215k as a top level ad executive in NYC is nothing. I won’t give away my salary but I almost make that much and my wife earns more than me. And neither of us are near Ken’s level at our respective companies.
Yeah that’s not the case. NYC is expensive so if you earn that much money you can be comfortable but not rich. We are definitely not paycheck to paycheck and live good lives though.
That hurts when my salary today would be equal to about 1.6M back then lol. Hurts even more living in California, where while it’s not nothing of course and I’m fortunate. It still doesn’t go as far as it should.
During my current rewatch my partner joined in for her first time seeing the show. We were checking with inflation calculators regularly. We also found Harry Crane complaining about tax brackets pretty funny. Not only has the conversation around tax brackets hardly changed, despite the percentages being cut drastically, they high tax brackets also clearly didn't stop people like Roger from wanting more money.
Yet $21k in 60s NY is enough to live extremely comfortably. Today $215k is about the minimum for a single income family of 2 kids to buy a nice house and live comfortably.
Inflation calculations are not a good indicator for real world inflation.
Pete Campbell makes $3,500 a year ($35,000 today). But a similar junior position today will start at $100k which adjusted for inflation is double the income for a family living comfortably in NYC in the 60s.
I've always found it a little amusing when Bert gives Don that bonus of $2500 sometime in the first couple of seasons (can't remember exactly) and Don looks incredulous.
Now, obviously $2500 today is still a lot of money and most people would be thrilled to get that. But Don looks flabbergasted, and it makes more sense when you look up that $2500 was around $25,000 in today's money.
now, take a look at asset prices lmao
that 215k equivalent in the 1960’s would buy like 5 houses
then consider that headline inflation is understated and inflation has been hotter than recorded
The average new york advertising account manager, today, averages $95-$125k a year, but that's not including commissions, bonuses, or expense accounts. It's also only the average, and 1960s New York would have been much more of a competitive market in comparison to today. We can see how much job movement occurred in the show, so ad firms would have had to pay more than today to keep good account men with them, especially considering that business seems to follow the account men, to a point. Lane Price also mentioned the reason why Ken got the Head of Accounts promotion as well, citing him as an exceptional account man. I think if you had an ad firm, and Ken Cosgrove was your account man, you'd probably be paying him $200k+ as well.
It really is crazy to think about.. I always have the inflation calculator pulled up when they discuss money on the show.
Same! His cool mill check he cut to Meghan (in 1970, I believe) is equivalent to 8 million today. Nice little divorce settlement.
And she completely deserved it for being married to Don
Especially close side ring she derailed her career because he said they were moving to Los Angeles. She would never have been a great actress but she’d have had steady work in the soap.
Whilst I do agree, she got her first break. Being Don's wife because he got her the commercial That was the catalyst No Don, no career. They were both toxic but the Megan sympathisers irk me. Her mother was right, she was entitled and wanted it all without working for it.
Megan and Don were worthwhile mostly because it gave us Roger Sterling asking Megan's mom who RegIna was. I love that part.
"You are speaking slowly so I understand? Forget. My. Name." Hahaha best line ever!!
Well said. She could have told Don "no" when he asked her to marry him.
Thaaaank youuuu! I severely dislike Megan and all the love for her on this subreddit baffles me. I often don't voice this, but I'm 100% team Betty. She's so flawed but willingly takes the L on lung cancer? Fucking tragic bruh. The literal definition of tragic. I love Betty because of her flaws, where as Megan? Thank you, next.
I like the moment when Harry is talking to Don in that episode and mentions how stupid a decision it was for. That’s when Don realizes he really owes her
When Don suggested a move to LA, Megan jumped at it. She said there have been a whole host of opportunities out west that she had never considered because of their roots in NYC. So while Don totally screwed her and their marriage by changing his mind last minute, I wouldn't say he bears culpability for her pursuit of and failure in an acting career in Cali. And as others mentioned, her NYC soap job happened because of the commercial gig for which Don helped get her foot in the door.
Damn. Imagine being such an asshole people think $8m is appropriate compensation for living with you
Especially when you consider he is probably one of the most attractive men on the planet. Yes, his being an emotionally unavailable, cheating, horrible jerk is irresistible. Why am I so attracted to that type of man? I'm not the only woman like this. What is it that makes the worst possible person (that we know from the start is bringing nothing but heartbreak), so incredibly appealing?
Get therapy?
You asking us? I dunno maybe try to work on your issues if a toxic piece of shit of a person can still be irresistible to you based solely on his looks.
Not really, but OK...
I was married to someone who made Don look like a rosy cheeked Boy Scout. I had to pay him a huge sum of money after the divorce settlement, despite all the abuse. Following that train of logic I was due an 8 or 9 figure settlement…
You were due a settlement
That’s not at all how divorces work in the US. Divorces are not a monetary fine for bad behavior
Why did you have to pay him
Yet, she was still a total bitch about it. Probably bought a shit load of spaghetti.
How the hell are people downvoting this?
Weird people that miss the point of the show and are horny for Don lol
The horniest are usually heterosexual men, weirdly
Nah it's women fawning over the other women. Christina in particular.
Something about men like that. I don't know what it is. I'm aware of how horrible they are, but those are the guys that create the butterflies (which I believe is actually my brain warning me against that person) that I can't resist.
You should look into attachment theory.. we have a lot of underlying motivations that can be addressed if we understand the root.
Great point! Thank you, and I have read about that. It's definitely helpful. I think I'm attracted to that kind of guy more when things in my life are unstable or at their lowest.
It's a lot of money. I'm sure plenty of people take issue with divorces paying out any money when there's no children involved.
Because they don't agree? She deserved something for him derailing her career but that's a lot of money. Especially because she never stopped pursuing it in California while living off his money. If anything he financially supported her career.
TBF, she thought going to California was good for her career. She said she'd been turning down opportunities there because she didn't think Don would want to go. So yeah, she quit her job because he said they were moving, but she only considered it a bad idea later.
Do you think Don is the good guy in this?
No.
Ok good, you're not on of those people
Because it’s insane- it suggests that a judge may levy a monetary fine on someone for not being a “good husband” or “good wife” which is seriously troubling
You know that moral damages exist and that jurisprudence exists to compensate for lost opportunities as a housewife?
Did I mention lost opportunities? And in my jurisdiction, moral damages no longer exist - they are archaic in the US Huge in Italy though and some catholic countries Do you actually think that if my wife cheated on me, in a no-fault divorce state- that I could sue her for moral damages? Do you think that’s how the laws work in no-fault states?
She did deserve a compensation, but 1 million was way too much. She was a simple naive girl, she probably ended up dying of an overdose or joining a Charlie Manson type cult and dumping all her money into that closely after.
I just multiply any mention of money by a factor of ten. Sometimes it works and sometimes it leads to even more questions.
It's correct for the first couple seasons
Can reduce it down to about 8× by the last couple
I watched "The Day of the Jackal" (1973) recently where the assassin asks for half a million dollars to kill the president of France, and all the conspirators fall off their chairs going "are you crazy?!" - So cute nowadays.
I love when people say I would never want to be a Harry or a Pete. Or even Don. Yes the fuck yoh do. It’s so idiotic, take Harry for example he’s living in such a higher tax bracket than majority of ppl. The mad men lived in a different world, they are all living in money. When they complain about not making ends meet they mean they can’t buy that 2000$ dinner because they have to pay rent on a MANHATTAN apartment. Oh also they all have nice ass automobiles.
You know there's more to life than money and cars, right??
Like having a family as most of these men do in lavish apartments/houses and amenities? You can be in someone like Harry’s circumstances and make different life choices. I’m pointing out how the writers laid out the cast. Don isn’t some alpha jock with his crew consisting of roger and the rest of the men are incel virgins. All of them are getting women, money, living the high life. Lots of people will flat out say we don’t want to be Harry but never really look at his life
Like spending time with family
They’re at a NYC professional services firm with Fortune 500 clients. What do you think people are making at big law firms, consulting firms, etc today?
Yep, inflation is an issue but at the same time they are an A list company working with the biggest companies in the world at the time.
And they were in the minor leagues, just imagine how much ppl at McCann were making.
Still the case with advertising though? I know a few former classmates who work in advertising and I'd say they earn below average compared to the rest of the cohort who went into other fields, but we're in a different country. Maybe it's different in the US/New York.
The ad agency model is built on junior creatives getting over worked and under paid while the account execs and directors are the one making more money. It’s sorta why the agency model has been on the decline into the 21st century.
I was lucky enough to start my copywriting career in the 1990s, beginning at regional shops (in Seattle), then moving to national agencies in San Francisco and LA. This coincided with the dotcom boom, before Google or many of the results metrics were available. Perhaps the last golden age of advertising. I'm commenting to show how lucrative advertising could be, back when people watched TV, read newspapers and magazines, and used mostly dialup internet. My salary history in 2024 dollars, over the course of 12 years (age 23-35). * First job: Junior level, regional direct mail shop, shit creative reputation - $46K * Second job: Mid level, regional full service agency, OK reputation - $65K. *I produced some good work here, nothing earth shattering.* * Third job: Mid level, regional full service, better reputation - $90K. *Client switched agencies, requested they hire me. Didn't work here long but I got a few things for my book.* * Fourth job: Mid level, big national agency, top-tier creative reputation - $57K. *Took a pay cut for the chance to work at a top shop, won a few national awards, eventually got laid off.* * Fifth job: Senior/ACD, smaller shop, spinoff of my previous agency- $192K. *Worked here for 3 years, strong TV reel, but left after the dotcom bust and also because I hated LA.* I took time off to have kids, freelanced a bit, and then fell into medical/pharma where I work on the client side to this day. I'm 53 and make about the same as I did in my mid 30s, but I sorta aged out of advertising. It's much harder to have a career like this nowadays, for many reasons. But it used to be kind of a gold mine, and not just for the SCDPs of the world,
You’ll have to thank Pete Campbell for creating direct mail otherwise you wouldn’t have had your first job!
Tip of the hat to Pete!
How is medical pharma? I wanna fall into client side of that and call it a career sometimes lmao.
You need to be very good with the weasel words, and legal needs to approve your copy. I'd have to mark it up in accordance with their marketing claims matrices (basically a spreadsheet showing the permitted language, and scientific backup). Also a lot of boilerplate; sometimes a whole extra page worth, or the majority of the TV script. Concepts are usually very watered down, too. But on the flip side, I find it interesting to write about medical topics. It's a bit of a niche in the copy world, though, because of all the legal constraints.
How can someone age out of advertising
It's not a literal thing. But it speaks to the fact ad agencies rarely hire ppl in their 40s and up, except for upper management roles. But if you're looking for a senior copywriter/art director/ACD job, it becomes harder as you approach your 40s and virtually impossible in your 50s. So many of us go for client-side jobs after a certain age, e.g. age out.
Advertising is less important than it used to be
Advertising is bigger than ever it’s just that the advertising companies are tech companies now. Google is an advertising company. They basically do what Harry Crane did.
Big advertising is tech companies, mixed with small being influencers. Really squeezed out the traditional companies.
That's true
Nah consumer packaged goods, retail and food are both just as big players in the ad space.
Those are companies that advertise, not advertising companies. Google sells ads.
The tech companies are the sponsors- the industry changed but no, it’s not bigger than ever
Tv advertising alone is a bigger industry than advertising as a whole in the 60s. And tv advertising is dwarfed by internet advertising.
Not in terms of cultural impact, no
Lmao
Do you work in advertising? I partnered with Y&R on a national campaign recently, why are you arguing this point?
Until recently I worked in advertising tech. Its a multi hundred billion dollar industry and you encounter our ads hundreds of times a day
The low level folks (coordinators, analysts, etc) aren’t making much comparatively. The executive and c-suite people (who are more comparable to the people we follow in Mad Men) do just fine.
Advertising can absolutely still make you absolute tons of money, just depends on what sector of advertising.
Not at all. Besides top executives, advertising salaries are low compared to other professional services. This is especially true for creative roles. With so much consolidation under the large ad holding companies, salaries have stayed consistently low in order to win clients with rock bottom prices.
Last really big salaries in advertising were in the 90s, some of them early 00s. I have a friend who is a VP in a big firm in NYC and she makes around USD300K a year, plus some bonuses. It is A LOT, but she is a VP and it is NYC.
Are they senior account executives?
No, but none of us have senior roles yet. Compared like to like the advertising people are worse off.
Yeah but you’re not comparing to the specific role that Ken had. If you’re looking at like a copywriter then of course they will earn less. Also advertising has changed a lot since the 50s so the role of the account executive is much different now.
No, it's the same now.
I know an account exec in a similar field as cosgrove and performing at a similar level and he makes over half a million a year
First year lawyers at big law firms make $225k base salary and it only goes up from there
Today the top 1% marketing managers would be earning $500,000 up to a 2-3 million salary. And a bonus would be no less than a couple hundred thousand.
> would be *paid* $500,000 up FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
New York lawyers (even the partners) work 100 hour weeks reading and drafting some of the most tedious documents known to mankind. Don shows up at the office at 10am to get wasted on whiskey and proffer forth some pop-psychology truisms, before heading off to dinner. Yes there are occasional moments of genius from him, and occasional late nights and weekends, but he is grossly overpaid for the work he does. There's a reason advertising is no longer like that any more.
I don't know, never known anyone who lived there. You'd have to make good money though to afford it. If 1 bedroom apartments are $1200 here and our median pay is 57k. They probably pay McDonalds workers 50k in NYC.
min wage workers here make roughly 30k/year. median rent in manhattan is like 4500 so service workers live in outer boroughs and have roommates, get lucky and win the affordable housing lottery, or live with family who have held on to the same rent stabilized apartment since the 70s and pay crazy low rent. But they have to make it possible to make it work somehow. Even if most of manhattan is a luxury theme park for finance bros, they still need the rest of us to staff it.
The situation is even worse when you regard other cost of living details. Things like Peggy’s townhouse, Pete’s apartment were $25k, $30k in the mid-60’s. Even Don’s penthouse was allegedly $55k. Which would be about 10X that value adjusted for inflation. But actually, that penthouse would probably be closer to $10M today. Don’s house in Ossining was maybe $30k, about $320k today, but actually closer to $800k in the current market.
Yeah the real estate thing is a good example of how you can’t just punch a dollar value into a CPI calculator. This series takes place during the white flight era, when the population of NYC declined as many residents fled for suburbia. The population declined from 7.78 million in 1960 to 7.07 million in 1980, and many of the people who fled to the suburbs were wealthier. This had the effect of severely depressing the value of NYC real estate. Not too many people who could afford a Manhattan penthouse actually wanted to live there. And of course recently real estate has appreciated much faster than core inflation, with the NYC real estate market being especially hot for much of the past 30 years. At a certain point we can’t figure out what the 2024 USD equivalent should be everything and just have to go along with the story.
> Today’s salaries are at such low levels, and no one realizes it.
Did a project in undergrad and one of the findings that came out of it was that since the “tax revolt” of the 1970s in states like California that gave rise to economic policies championed by Reagan in the 80s, two things coincide: 1. Union participation has declined. 2. Wages, adjusted for inflation, stagnated. 3. Worker productivity exploded (thanks in part to gains in technology). Effectively, the American worker has not received a raise since the 1970s.
This reminds of an article I bookmarked some years back. [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/)
You’re blaming Reagan for this, but this trend started long before he became president.
Yeah because he was part of the broader movements that were responsible for the trend
If you look at what was happening in the late 60s/70s in the US, our economy was beginning to encounter trouble because Europe and Japan had rebuilt by then and they were outcompeting us. The US had an artificially boosted economy from the mid 40s to the late 1960s because all of our industrial competition conveniently spent the last 7 years destroying each other’s industrial base. That left the US as the only game in town for a while. Not only did our factories run at full capacity to produce weapons, but those weapons were used to blow up our competition’s factories. By the mid 1940s Germany, France, England, Italy, Russia, and Japan were pretty much out of commission. So they had to rebuild from the ground up. But once they did, they had modern factories and our older factories could no longer compete. On top of that, their economies were depressed while ours was at an all-time high. This put our exports at a disadvantage compared to poorer nations. To further complicate matters, the deferred social benefits that companies offered during the Great Depression/WW2 when we didn't have money were beginning to bite us in the ass. We had people retiring with generous retirement pensions that just weren’t sustainable. Obviously this has a ripple effect in our politics.
Don't forget fiat currency + loose fiscal and monetary policy = capital aggregation in the parts of the economy that readily access newly minted cash (aka banks)
Soviet industrial capacity was largely relocated out of German military reach prior to Operation Barbarossa.
Their critical war factories, yeah. But they still had to rebuild their own country after the war. The Western side of it was pretty well destroyed. They also didn't seem to do much trade in the open market. They serviced their satellite states, but I never remember seeing any Soviet stuff here in the US.
This is true. Similarly also to how the British didn't really suffer massive infrastructure damage either but did suffer disproportionate population losses + massive wealth depletion + the loss of traditionally essential economic bases in the accelerated wave of post-colonial decolonization.
Union participation declined as manufacturing as a percentage of the economy decline, not really related to policy. Service sectors have not traditionally had unions and most people are service workers today.
[You are full of shit.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) Edit: Look at the chart, you dolts. Median real wages keep going up. Sorry to break up the circlejerk.
That data doesn’t look like it accounts for inflation though. It’s just based on surveyed citizens one what they make weekly (adjusted if they self report hourly or monthly or whatnot)
Real earnings are adjusted for inflation. It literally says “CPI Adjusted” at the top.
Ah I didn’t know what CPI was, I looked it up and get it now. It’s also a poll of people 16 and up and minimum wage going up is going to be a big part of that on that most recent spike (which will further push the cost of living up too.) That really didn’t help anyone in the long run
Minimum wage has little to do with it. Almost nobody makes that. Also, if it did, why would it matter? Have you considered that, if you didn’t even know what CPI is, that you have no idea what you’re taking about?
I wasn’t even disagreeing with you, I was asking about the data set and trying to learn about something I’m not terribly familiar with. Have you considered you’re an unreasonably miserable human being?
There are tons of people making $500k+/year that live in NYC. Today's salaries aren't low, it's just that this show is about rich people.
If anything this cohort of people is richer. They might not be working in advertising anymore, but the Sterling/Coopers of the world tend to find themselves in industries that pay well that they can nepo themselves into.
And within the show, people focus more on the rich people, and not Pete's $5200 a year or whatever, let alone Peggy
Not someone doing Don’s job, I’ll tell you that much.
What are you getting at? Today's Creative Directors (like Don) don't realize they're underpaid?
The average creative director in NYC makes anywhere between $150K and $200K. That's average, so median is most likely slightly lower. A farcry away from Don's $5MM adjusted for inflation
He's also not just any creative director. He was one of the most sought after. I'd agree that his salary numbers aren't realistic, but the top dogs are making 7 figures.
That's fair
He didn't get 5m that was payout for his partnership. Good God the financial illiteracy of lefties online is staggering.
I was saying **adjusted for inflation** Don was making 5M a year. He made several hundred thousand dollars a year from salary and bonuses, which adjusted for inflation is a few million. Don netted approximately $3M in 1970 dollars from the McCann buyout, that's around $20M in today's dollars. Don wrote Megan a check for $1 million in 1960's dollars like it was nothing. Dude had infinite money
That's not what he said
This.
It's a high salary, but it's New York and he's working with giant corporate clients. It wouldn't be strange to be pulling $200k in Ken's shoes today at an ad agency. And remember Ken is a golden boy: other people (Harry) are shocked by his salary, he's promoted a year later to Head of Accounts. He's got to be one of the best-compensated account guys at the firm. Also keep in mind that the "advertising industry" has changed a lot since the 1960s: major agencies aren't the only places that higher well-paid ad executives. Tech is largely funded by ad dollars--someone like Ken might be managing major corporate advertising accounts for Facebook, and making a hell of a lot more than $215,000.
For real, if you want to live and work in NYC (or live in scary Montclair, NJ, and commute) you need to be making $200k…and so does your spouse.
This was back when New York was still affordable. Peggy buys an entire building on an upper middle class salary.
Tbf she bought a rundown old brownstone that was converted into two apartments, in a terrifying neighborhood. It’d be like buying in the South Bronx or Newark today, which she probably could do. Before, she was looking at a 2br condo on the UES that was a hike from the subway, which is maybe above her 2024 price range but not *obscenely* so. (She’d probably be in a 1br now.) New York was always expensive.
I think you just proved my point.
That's not far off. At all. An account man working a role like kens would also be able to do that or more today. He had some of their main accounts in his portfolio. I'm an account manager and I'll do around 250k this year. Many in the "high end" of the business can clear 300-500k / year. Don getting 5 million usd in a merger where he is name partner? Yes. That fits pretty well.
Executive compensation has actually risen a lot since then. Don would get way more than five million.
I spent so long making barely anything. Didnt break 50k until 2022. My Dad was telling me I'd be able to live easy on 77k, as he was making that in 1999. I told him that would be like me making almost double what I do now and he didn't believe me. Trust me, I'm grateful here in Florida to make what I make with just a HS diploma. My gf has a college degree in Biology and makes $20.50 an hour. They pay us so poorly here.
You realize that most of the characters on Mad Men went to schools you used to get in if you had the right family and got their jobs from their wealthy networks, right? This is a show about rich people and they exist now as well as they did then. And 77k + $20.50 an hour aren’t terrible in Florida. It’s just that these people were doing quite a bit better than “not terrible”.
All of what you're saying here is accurate, but you seem to be missing key points. This is a show about some of the highest paying jobs in the US in the 60s. Madison Avenue ad men are used as a lens into that time for a reason. Of course you're not going to be making as much as they are without a high school diploma. But plenty of similar jobs in NYC are still making that type of money.
Bio degrees are a dime a dozen though. Failed pre-meds have flooded the already small market.
I bet you earn every penny too 😂 Hard work schmoozing clients and bullying your colleagues into finishing their work faster. You’re a hero 🫡🫡🫡
I don't think you have any clue what I do. And you appear pretty sour. I don't have any people reporting to me. I don't care how fast my colleagues finish their work, only my own work matters.. I don't do any kind of dinners or trips or anything like that. I'm on-site at my customers, advising how to apply my products when and if it makes sense. And apparently I do a good job, because they pay me handsomely and my customers like me. Once you start working with large enterprise and get a high budget, you also get a good salary. I am responsible for the 50 largest accounts in my country + our largest resellers and a handful of mid-sized.
A lot of people are saying that things weren’t really much better back then, and that people didn’t have much more money, but explain something to me: I have a 2 Cub Cadet tractors from the late 60s/early 70s. Those things were everywhere back then, very popular tractors. They cost about $1200 back in 1970. That would be nearly $10,000 today. Nobody is going to spend that kind of money for a garden tractor nowadays. Or similarly, people bought the original Atari 2600 for $189 back in 1977. It was a very popular video game system. In today’s dollars it would be like $950. A video game that cost that much wouldn’t be a popular product, but it was then.
Watch your toes around those tractors.
Yeah, that's one major lack of safety- you get off of it and the blades keep turning.
Apple Vision Pro is $3,500 but it’s not popular.
You are not thinking of this correctly. When my parents bought their 19" TV I had as a child in the mid-70's it cost $400 then. That's almost $3,000 in today's dollars. And my dad says that's what it felt like. It was a major purchase. When they bought the speakers for their stereo before I was born they were $600. That's about $5000 today. That was also a major purchase that they spent a long time paying off. My folks were not affluent. That's just what it cost to buy regular made-in-America items those days that were made with 100% manual labor and little automation. A Schwinn Paramount 10-speed bike cost $299 in 1970. That's $2,500 today. For items that are not limited buy supply--Scotch whisky, fine art, etc--there's no point in human history where material goods cost less than they do now. In 1880 an hour of light in your home required about three hours of labor to buy. Today it's about one second of labor to get one hour of light.
Very interesting.
Things that DO cost a lot more are things that require a lot of human inputs--stone carving on buildings, for example, or any other masonry. Most of the people who have the skills to do masonry work are engineers now. You can't build the Empire State building out of carved limestone if you're paying each worker $150,000 a year. Same for things that are service intensive. Agatha Christie wrote that when she was pregnant her and her husband planned to get a *second* *full time live in servant* to work as a nanny, but she couldn't conceive of buying a car. Those were for rich people. Similarly, my dad as a middle manager type for the state of Michigan in the 80's *had his own secretary*. How else was he going to mail meeting schedule notification letters to ten people? Type them on a typewriter himself?
I did this too with the kid Harry Crane hired as script reader. I remember it being shockingly a lot for an entry level job, the description of which is very similar to the position I started off on TV, though I got paid significantly less. Anyway, here is a copy paste: __________ Set in 1962, "A Night to Remember" is Mad Men's 2nd season's 8th Episode. A character is brought on as a new hire for a new department created for the growing medium of Television. He's paid $150 a week for what amounts to an entry level job - he in fact replaces the head of personelle, who's doing the job of "Script Reader" temporarily, without much training. Light duty, but a bit of a time suck, the job requires reading television scripts, noting the themes, and ensuring compatibility with which commercials to air. Eg: if someone is dying of lung cancer on the show, you can't show cigarette ads. How much is 1962's $150 (or $3.75 an hour assuming 40hr workweek) worth today in 2023? Using an American inflation calculator= $1,534.96/week Or around $38.37/hour Or almost $80,000 a year. I looked at indeed.Com and found that entry level jobs in TV and or advertising in NYC land you $48k to $60k. There's variability, but $80k is for managerial positions with experience and or more skilled jobs like writing and producing. Let's be generous and say you're actually getting $65k or $31/hr So far, a bit disappointing in that it proves wages have fallen behind inflation. But let's look at other costs. In 1962, US avg is $0.29 US gal. Only 7.7% of that Mad Men hourly wage. Right now gas in NYC is $3.87 US gal. Or 12.5% of of our hourly example entry level salary. https://www.flickr.com/photos/14696209@N02/3879042350 In 1962, this is a McDonald's menu. $0.15 for cheeseburger. Let's get two in case portions were smaller back then= 30c or 8% of our hourly wage. A big Mac in NY today is $5.23 or 16.9% of the 31 an hour salary. Housing in NYC has gotten insane and even historically cheap neighbourhoods have been gentrified, thus proving that everything is out of reach for anyone just entering the workforce, even with post secondary. So let's look at cars. A 1962 vette was stickered at $4,038. Or 51.8% of the annual salary of our Madison Ave script reader. Today, a coupe Stingray is about 65k Or 100% of the salary of our imaginary NYC TV/advert lackey. _________ So, fuck modern life, right? To the salaried employee entering the workforce today, the buying power of their wage is literally half that of their silent generation /elder boomer grandparents.
It should be noted that this show isn’t reality, and with some of the salaries they aren’t totally accurate. For instance Pete says his salary in season one and it’s way too low for what he would have actually made.
A bunch of my friends work in advertising in NYC and they all make more than Ken’s inflation take-home. This is a show about wealthy NYC professionals, many with Ivy League degrees, and those people are still very well compensated.
It is crazy indeed how on CPI index it is a 10x thing. But it’s also not exactly that simple. Using such an inflation index purely impacts general buying power as a whole. Higher ticket things like real estate doesn’t hold to the 10x exactly. Taxes were much different for higher incomes of the day back then too. Just some examples. The general 10x rule is illustrative but doesn’t tell the full story. That said you used the Ken example and I always felt that wasn’t even really realistic for the time. The equivalent of $200k plus annual today shouldn’t apply to any account man not the head of accounts. Unless it included commissions and he was just killing it.
Mad Men is a show about rich people. If they made it today Peggy would be making $200-250k, the partners would be millionaires, Roger is probably worth $100 million, Cooper $250 million, something along those lines. Edit: Mad Men is a show about the 1%, I guess people don't realize that.
It's crazy , like those memes glorifying the 60s showing the Draper family ... The average American was more like Adam than Don
Cooper is definitely a billionaire.
Lou nonchalantly gives Peggy a $100/week raise. That’s a $45k salary bump in today’s world.
How much would the $410 she got from Roger for the Mohawk work be?
About $3200.
Why would they make a big deal? It was a big ad agency with many giant customers: Heinz, Chevy just to name a few.
Lou gave Peggy a 40K a year raise that time to buy her loyalty.
A lot of people are saying that things weren’t really much better back then, and that people didn’t have much more money, but explain something to me: I have a 2 Cub Cadet tractors from the late 60s/early 70s. Those things were everywhere back then, very popular tractors. They cost about $1200 back in 1970. That would be nearly $10,000 today. Nobody is going to spend that kind of money for a garden tractor nowadays. Or similarly, people bought the original Atari 2600 for $189 back in 1977. It was a very popular video game system. In today’s dollars it would be like $950. A video game that cost that much wouldn’t be a popular product, but it was then.
Seem like higher wages then / against inflation now, but with the high tax brackets back in the 60s Ken was getting pumped. Would Don not have been on a 70% tax for 500k? If it was pre-64 / 90%!
lol professionals in NYC are all making mid 6 figures if they are halfway decent at their job… just like back then
I wonder how much the other partners are making in the merger because they make it seem like Don is the only one making money and is richer than everyone else.
“That mannequin makes $300 a week? He’s not married!”
In those days 99% of familles had only one salary to live on. Since women got into the work force à lot of families have two revenues and are willing to both take a little less and still live good. There was a race to lower the salaries since if you had two instead of one you could out compete the single salary people. That's why today it's almost unthinkable to have a family on single salary since you have to earn twice as much to be on the same level.
>Don getting 500k for the mergers would be equivalent to getting 5 million today. Now check what executives actually get today in such a situation. Executive pay has well out paced inflation.
Are you an account executive on Madison Avenue? I bet account execs these days make 215k in New York. The ones I work with in the ad-tech industry actually make much more than that Edit: OP doesn’t have a college degree. He should be comparing his salary to Adam Whitman not Ken Cosgrove
OP what point are you trying to make? Yes, people who work at the top of their field in NYC have big salaries…
As everyone else is saying, they are highly paid professionals and similar positions today exist. A successful account executive will easily be making 200+ thousand. Don was the sole creative director and a partner. He would also radio y be making mid 6 figures as a salary as well as equity payouts as bonuses or when a company is sold. Also the most important aspect is that your take-home pay is significantly higher today even if the inflated amount is less because people were paying up to 90% in income taxes up to the 80s until the Reagan tax cuts. 200k -90% = 20k take home. Your 77k is taking home much much. Probably around 55-60k depending on location.
The Ken story arc doesn't make that much sense, he's pulling in a lot more than what his coworkers like Peter are pulling in.
They’re on Maddison Avenue in New York working on some of the biggest brands at the time. It’s pretty fair in that context.
In 1965 a personal filing individually and earning $21k in income was also paying a 48% tax rate…a lot has changed since then.
Ibwish we could have those tax rates again. Think of how great things would be with all that money for social programs. We could have government run ISP's, Healthcare, infrastructure, paid parental leave. And it's funny on a show like Mad Men. People like this were responsible for reshaping our society into the ultimate consumers. Behind Bert Cooper's sweet old man look is the shows most dangerous man. The ultra rich who buy influence and lobby governments.
Ken is an accounts guy, and a good one. Successful salespeople are generally among the best paid, as they are bringing in the dollars and every company needs money.
Damn I’m in the same boat!
When Don gives Midge his $2100 check and says “go buy a car”. Ugh.
they were mad about da moneyyyy
I thought about that too. A 20k bonus would be like 10k now. People made so much more money back in the day and didn't work nearly as hard.
I seem to remember Betty finding his paycheck for $950 take home, but I couldn't tell if it was monthly, biweekly or what. I am guessing bi weekly.
$215k as a top level ad executive in NYC is nothing. I won’t give away my salary but I almost make that much and my wife earns more than me. And neither of us are near Ken’s level at our respective companies.
That's awesome, I can't imagine making that much money. Must make life quite a lot simpler not having to worry about paying for anything.
Yeah that’s not the case. NYC is expensive so if you earn that much money you can be comfortable but not rich. We are definitely not paycheck to paycheck and live good lives though.
That hurts when my salary today would be equal to about 1.6M back then lol. Hurts even more living in California, where while it’s not nothing of course and I’m fortunate. It still doesn’t go as far as it should.
Op what do you do?
wow that makes me feel kinda terrible.
I just watched the episode with Peggy’s $19k and that’s nearly $200k!
Same as McD to 2014 then
Also crazy when Pete and Trudy were house hunting and their 14th floor Manhatten apartment was the equivalent of like 200,000 USD today
During my current rewatch my partner joined in for her first time seeing the show. We were checking with inflation calculators regularly. We also found Harry Crane complaining about tax brackets pretty funny. Not only has the conversation around tax brackets hardly changed, despite the percentages being cut drastically, they high tax brackets also clearly didn't stop people like Roger from wanting more money.
It's not just about salaries and inflation. Corporations paid much higher taxes. Whatever happened there.
it's always been pretty known to 10x all the prices mentioned in the show to estimate today's dollars
Nominal dollar amounts are less than irrelevant.
Plenty of people make 200k and it’s no big deal. Especially in New York and California.
That's top 5% of individual income. It's a big deal.
The ad industry in NY back then was like the finance or tech industry today. Those salaries sound pretty normal for as big as those guys were.
Don got a heck of a lot more than 500k in the mergers if I’m remembering correctly.
I think you’re missing the point. They are supposed to be rich big shots.
Yet $21k in 60s NY is enough to live extremely comfortably. Today $215k is about the minimum for a single income family of 2 kids to buy a nice house and live comfortably. Inflation calculations are not a good indicator for real world inflation. Pete Campbell makes $3,500 a year ($35,000 today). But a similar junior position today will start at $100k which adjusted for inflation is double the income for a family living comfortably in NYC in the 60s.
I've always found it a little amusing when Bert gives Don that bonus of $2500 sometime in the first couple of seasons (can't remember exactly) and Don looks incredulous. Now, obviously $2500 today is still a lot of money and most people would be thrilled to get that. But Don looks flabbergasted, and it makes more sense when you look up that $2500 was around $25,000 in today's money.
now, take a look at asset prices lmao that 215k equivalent in the 1960’s would buy like 5 houses then consider that headline inflation is understated and inflation has been hotter than recorded
The average new york advertising account manager, today, averages $95-$125k a year, but that's not including commissions, bonuses, or expense accounts. It's also only the average, and 1960s New York would have been much more of a competitive market in comparison to today. We can see how much job movement occurred in the show, so ad firms would have had to pay more than today to keep good account men with them, especially considering that business seems to follow the account men, to a point. Lane Price also mentioned the reason why Ken got the Head of Accounts promotion as well, citing him as an exceptional account man. I think if you had an ad firm, and Ken Cosgrove was your account man, you'd probably be paying him $200k+ as well.