Last night was the second-season premiere of the TV series Mad Men. I watched the series devoutly last year; this year, it has gotten such a huge press buildup that I was almost sick of it before it aired.
Last night’s episode didn’t push the storylines forward too much, since it needed to reacclimate viewers to where the characters stand. But there was one significant theme: Don Draper, at 36, is feeling older. He seems prepped, mentally and physically, for a midlife crisis. So when he’s having lunch in a bar and sees the fellow next to him reading Meditations in an Emergency, a collection of Frank O’Hara‘s poems, it makes an impression. Later in the show we see a beauty shot of the book’s cover as Draper himself reads it intently.
I clicked over to Amazon to check the book’s sales rank a few minutes after Draper read the book. A rather mediocre No. 15,565. This morning, at 8:30 a.m., the book was ranked No. 161. That probably represents only 50 or 100 copies sold, but it’s a pretty fantastic leap for a 50-year-old book of poems. Since Mad Men is set in the early 1960′s, publishers are obviously limited in their product-placement opportunities. But I’m sure all of you can think of some good books to get in the hands of some current TV characters.
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It would be interesting if someone (either with a good relationship with Amazon to get at historical data or a lot of time on their hands) could track placements vs. rankings.
I’d be interested to know whether book sales jumps were correlated with audience sizes, or whether books on mid-life crises are disproportionately attractive to TV audiences
Because Exodus figured prominently in the 1st season, the 1961 Leon Uris bestseller Mila 18, about the Warsaw uprising, might find a place. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and had just published The Winter of Our Discontent … surely a resonant title for this season’s themes. For some reason, books about Italy or Italians were quite popular during Camelot: The Agony and the Ecstasy and Daughter of Silence. Because of the obscenity trial, The Tropic of Cancer showed up on a lot of bedside tables.
The NY Public Library has one copy of O’Hara’s book, which now has six ‘holds’ (people who have requested it.) I certainly hadn’t checked it last week, but I doubt that demand is normally that high.
Proof that product placement works. Now if only we could get no one tell the executives.
When placement works via Amazon it’s possible to search by the placement context only (‘mad men poetry book’) and get a short-cut hand-crafted link to the item’s detail page but that hasn’t happened yet. Oprah’s book club is still much more effective. I’ve seen these for books mentioned on NPR and NY Times Op-Ed pages.
Last week ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ was ranked #385,524.
Amazing. I thought the same thing while watching last night: How many people are going to buy this book?
I have a placement idea: Show a shot of Barney’s work desk from “How I Met your Mother,” but this time include Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power.”
What about Atlas Shrugged, from last year’s season? Is there a way to check Amamzon for that? It was mentioned in several episodes.