Even in today's changing marketing landscape, we could stand to learn a thing or two from those who came before us.

Modern-day marketing...meet timeless design.

Many of you may already be familiar with the Mad Men television series and its protagonist, Donald Draper, the prototypical, charming (and troubled) 1960’s ad man.

If you haven’t yet seen the program, imagine back to the days where a hunch and a catchy tagline could shape the way America made its purchasing decisions for decades to come. Our preconceived opinions on virtually everything from vodka to Volkswagens were shaped during these “golden years” of advertising.

Ahh…the good old days.

While the traditional ad-shop will probably always have a place in how we conduct business, there is absolutely no denying that the divide between Madison Avenue and Main Street USA is atrophying with each day that we better understand the true power behind the internet. Namely, the web’s amazing knack for speeding up the process of creating meaningful relationships.

However, we can still learn from the traditional advertising greats...

Traditional advertising has been given a particularly bad name as of late, seen as a tool of the unimaginative and overcapitalized behemoths of industry. The idea being that these companies are happy to throw more money at the problem in hopes of cramming their ideals (and products) down our collective throats until we simply can no longer resist them. This may be true, at least in part, but let’s do ourselves the favor of digging a bit deeper.

What is difficult to dispute about traditional advertising/copywriting/design, is how the truly great ads have always had a way of quickly and elegantly relating to a large group of people on a very basic level. For instance, a simple and elegant black and white design, with an even simpler bit of copy, “Think Small,” forever changed the way Americans viewed Volkswagen…virtually overnight.

Inbound marketing, however, is at its core a much longer process. Rather than trying to obtain maximum market penetration with a singe campaign, as inbound marketers, we create a breadth of content and cast a very wide net.

We write, we test, we nurture. We write and test again; steadily bringing along our potential customers until doing business with us becomes a natural conclusion. Of course, this is done with very good reason. For starters, it works. Secondly, it is executable at a much more reasonable cost when compared to traditional “outbound” marketing.

What if we took the best parts of these ads and combined them with our “inbound” strategy?

What do you remember most about your favorite ads? Is it the catchy copy? “Where’s the beef,” “got milk,” or “just do it” come to mind. Was it the interesting use of graphics that caught your attention, or the consistency and familiarity of a company's branding over the years (new Coke anyone)? Most likely it was a combination of both; working together to create a message that tugged at your heartstrings, motivated you or made you laugh.

Chances are, at no point was the feeling created by these messages directly related to the massive amounts of money being spent on these campaigns. Nor did you care much that this message was simultaneously being received by millions of consumers like you. Instead, at that moment it was as if they were speaking only to you, to your immediate wants, to your needs. This feeling could probably have been accomplished through a sketch on a restraint napkin as much as it might have been with a $500,000 television ad.

These are the underpinnings of how we build a brand, and after the millions of dollars, traditionally used to push this brand to the masses, are stripped away, they still work surprisingly well within the world of inbound marketing.

This is also just one small, but important, part of what we like to call Inbound Web Design.

So, Donald Draper is alive and kicking…he’s simply been repurposed. He’s worth keeping on life support and working hard for your business in your social media conversations, within your blog and throughout your website design, for the foreseeable future anyway.

Want more? Take a look at our 4 “old-school” advertising techniques to help build your online brand now.