Mad Men? Try Some Real Scoundrels

Doree Shafrir's lively 1,800-word gripe about the loss of big, bad personalities in the advertising industry since the days of Mad Men ends with a telling moan.

"In any case, advertising has been usurped by public relations as the industry of choice for those seeking a route to glamour. It's ironic, of course, because P.R. used to be the industry whose leading practitioners were invisible; a good P.R. agent never let himself usurp his client's fame. Today, Heidi Montag, one of the stars of MTV's reality show The Hills, looks pretty behind the desk of an L.A. publicity agency whose founder, Brent Bolthouse, is perfectly content to let the camera linger on his carefully slicked black hair. And thus, a whole generation of teenagers is indoctrinated in the joys of clipboard-holding.

"They had David Ogilvy; we have Heidi Montag."

You know the industry has slid when the flacks are supposedly more glamorous.

But Shafrir overstates. Outside the small, unique world of celebrity publicists, the flacking life seems tamer than ever, with "corporate communications professionals" brandishing "APR" accreditations while whining in chorus for more CSR budget.

Adsters can pine for the days of erudite characters like Ogilvy, but flacks have to hearken back to Fast Eddie Bernays, whose stunts included introducing smoking to the other half of the population by positioning cigarettes as the "torches of freedom" lighting the way for the suffrage movement.

Either way, Jack Flack cannot help recalling the cliche that the average guy is ashamed if his father was a burglar, but proud if his great-grandfather was murderous bank robber.