Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

we saw that joan could do his job 10x better than him w/o breaking a sweat but that applies to alot of characters

his job = harry; pete's probably the most insightful person (maybe peg) at scdp, though this maybe purely an aspect of his relative youth (though considering harry's about the same age maybe not). sterling cooper's always been depicted as at least a step behind - the first season had draper being skeptical of ddb.

he's never shown any great insight, intelligence or understanding of the business

what about when he exploited his personal loss to attempt to get the airline...? or screwing over his father-in-law to get bigger accounts? Or telling Ted Chaugh to go fuck himself? Or milking the jai-alai moron? Pete is plenty insightful/intelligent.

Harry can be a schmuck, but there's a haplessness about him that I find sympathetic.

forced?? Really??

did you even watch the premiere episode?! Roger said "move out and give your office to Pete" and Harry was like "uh okay please don't fire me"

what about when he exploited his personal loss to attempt to get the airline...? or screwing over his father-in-law to get bigger accounts? Or telling Ted Chaugh to go fuck himself? Or milking the jai-alai moron? Pete is plenty insightful/intelligent.

i see him as sharp and wily: clever enough to recognize the openings and weaknesses around him, unscrupulous enough to exploit them. this doesn't make him brilliant, but it does make him a very successful jr. shark.

he's basically the template of the corporate asshole. arrogant, entitled, pushy as hell, sharp enough to get what he wants, largely untroubled by compassion or decency.

also first season (first episode?) makes clear that what sterling cooper sells really is airtime/print space/etc. the actual ads are the flourish to their middle manning. harry, i believe, basically acts as a liaison between clients and the networks and protects clients interests by making sure their ads aren't awkwardly placed or that they aren't caught off guard by controversial programming. unless he's writing peyton place fanfic on the side there is no creative aspect to his job. the big floorshine ad that don won an award for was a tv ad. if harry was great at his job he might be spotting opportunities for synergy or conceiving product placement (i think tv is finally past the point of 'chesterfield cigarettes proudly presents the flintstones' or whatever by this time right?). instead he relays concerns from clients to networks, he covers his ass, he gets a hard-on when he meets elizabeth mcgovern, etc.

for reasons that aren't ever made clear: clients don't seem to like him, and he's never shown any great insight, intelligence or understanding of the business).

this is otm and a major hurdle in the verisimilitude of the show, imo. no client would ever like this guy = i don't believe it.

agree that his business is largely the business of being an asshole. he is good at it.

xp

what clients didn't like Pete? Jojo loved him.

i don't remember Jojo.

jai-alai

yeah don vaguely tried to scuttle that out of some vague sense of human decency right? which is why don isn't in sales.

let's also not forget, Harry is the one who got Sal fired.

just because they write that a character would love pete doesn't mean i would believe it.

saying you don't believe it is different than saying the show doesn't depict it. I don't think Pete is really shown as not working well with clients.

No, Pete's mostly elbowing coworkers to make sure they make a good impression on his clients, at least that was always my impression. They don't love him like they love Don, but I think Pete knows that and kind of leverages himself against his more impressive/formidable coworkers to keep his clients, if that makes sense.

fair enough. i've never really seen it and believed it.

just because they write that a character would love pete doesn't mean i would believe it.

yeah, exactly. pete's an awkward, creepy charisma vacuum, and that makes his success in sales extremely difficult to understand/accept. dunno whether this is a fault in the show's conception/writing, kartheiser's performance or both.

example of pete's not doing well with clients: his meeting with the mohawk gang. they clearly preferred sterling, and not just due to familiarity and age. pete himself asknowledged that roger is "good with clients", implying that he knows he isn't. he has absolutely no clue about how to put others at ease. he's completely awkward and off-putting in every social situation, especially when he's trying to be gracious.

pete's the ultimate "guy no one likes but who succeeds anyway". problem is that though those guys do exist, they aren't generally in sales.

or if they are, they're a lot more superficially charming than pete

like dwight schrute?

dwight wouldn't make a good salesperson, either. but the office is an absurd comedy, so the implausibility doesn't matter.

have you ever met a person in sales that actually made you want to buy something?

no, but i've spent a lot of time working with salespeople, and i have a pretty good idea what kind of people do well in that biz. #1 skill is being able to schmooze happily w people who have money to spend, whoever they might be.

you're thinking of strippers

lol, strippers are salespeople, and salespeople love strippers, so...

Pete's articulate and in awe of the creative side of his agency; he's direct, works hard and has all the proper WASP manners and goes to the right country clubs.

Roger's an entertaining drunk who inherited his one big client, then lost him. He's flippant and spoiled and comes across as largely uninterested in business.

I don't know anything about advertising IRL but I think these respective traits and their relation to building or losing business are more or less consistent in the show's world.

It's hard to imagine a client humiliating Pete the way Lucky Strike Jr. did Roger at the Christmas party. Roger's lack of formality or distance seems more of a liability than an asset.

That Ken is more like Pete than Roger seems appropriate as well.

Roger said "move out and give your office to Pete" and Harry was like "uh okay please don't fire me"

no Harry was like "bullshit man, I am TV" and Roger was like "ah fuckit how much spare cash do I have in my pocket? oh $1000 how about that" and Harry was too dazzled to either stand his ground or intuit the status endrun that Roger was pulling

he's never shown any great insight, intelligence or understanding of the business

Pete has def. been shown to have insight and business sense at times, there was a whole episode based around his wanting to advertise to black people when no one else in the company could imagine that that would be a lucrative market

Pete's articulate and in awe of the creative side of his agency; he's direct, works hard and has all the proper WASP manners and goes to the right country clubs.

Roger's an entertaining drunk who inherited his one big client, then lost him. He's flippant and spoiled and comes across as largely uninterested in business.

I don't know anything about advertising IRL but I think these respective traits and their relation to building or losing business are more or less consistent in the show's world.

― RCMP, Thursday, April 5, 2012 7:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. you guys are crazy. pete doesnt bro down with clients but there's also just you know ... being professional ... knowing what the client wants to hear ... making sure they get what they want ... there are lots of ways to be good at that job that dont necessarily involve making bad jokes & boozing w/ them a la roger

no Harry was like "bullshit man, I am TV" and Roger was like "ah fuckit how much spare cash do I have in my pocket? oh $1000 how about that"

this is not what happened. Harry thought he was getting fired.

"we can have the conversation you thought we were having"

exactly. as soon as Roger realized Harry was confessing to a fireable offense Roger told him he could either take his pocket cash (which is a totally insulting way to buy off somebody!) and lose his office, or Roger could get him fired.

iow, Harry is worth roughly $1,100 to SCDP

Roger was never going to fire him for that, they would have bro-d down about it if Harry was capable of broing down, he was just telling him to stop looking a gift horse in the mouth

nb Megan looks like a gift horse, in the mouth

yeah, okay, granted. i went to far in saying that he's never shown insight etc. modify to: the show has only rarely taken the time to point out pete's real value (goes double for harry). for the most part, they just have pete magically attract clients, something that doesn't seem well supported by his basic character.

roger's big value is that he is culturally "of business". he's at ease around wealth & executive power. he speaks its language. it's clear that his glory days are past him, though, and at this point he's deluding himself into thinking that his ability to entertain drunk clients makes him indispensable.

that all went back to dmr on pete's advertising savvy

there are two type of account people, really. there's the ones that schmooze and play nicey-nicey with clients. they can get a lot of places going that route. then there's the account people who try to anticipate the client's needs and be smarter than the client. it's a bit rougher, because sometimes it means your clients might not actually like you.

however, the first type of guy is more easily fired--because guys who are fun and want to schmooze are a dime a dozen. the account people who bring about results are the ones who grow business.

it was a big revelation when advertising companies realized there's more money in buying media than there is in selling ads. Harry's job is pretty important, but he's replaceable.

The client's don't have to love Pete, but he pays attention to them and tells them what they want to hear and calls them back, so he's good at that job.

otoh, pete's a rapist & harry's just a lech

so,

Pete (and to an extent, Roger) is in the weird position of being a salesperson in a marketing company selling marketing to the sales departments (or company heads) of other companies.

I think Pete is OK at sales, but he's never shown that he's got a skill for the creative side of the business.

Harry is in the position where he's straddling the two -- he's not selling SCDP's products, he just came up with better ways to use media (television!) but he's still not the creator of marketing materials on tv -- he delegates most of the actual legwork. So he's weak to clients because he's not in sales, and he's weak in the office because he's not a producer of material -- he's just finding tv opportunities for existing clients to be sold commercials.

So in other words, Harry is doomed to middle management

oh god Harry is perfect middle-management material

no discernible skills; olympic-level blame-shifter; at an early point in his career was creative enough to do something that justified him getting an office and will rest on that laurel for the rest of his natural born life.

he doesn't want to move up, he just wants to be left alone. he's made it to the middle and that's where he'll stay.

I work with so many of these it's ridiculous.

he doesn't want to move up, he just wants to be left alone.

lol that's me!

actually I think I just described myself too, lol

i think you described every half-decent person who works in an office

we are Harry