Sex and nostalgia: both still sell

My new favorite series, which was launched yesterday in Spain on Canal +, is MAD MEN. I know the series already has a following in the States but alas it has just arrived here. I feel for the girls and guys in the program, who are teeter-tottering constantly between sanity and exhaultation.

The advertising world has changed much in since the 60's, no doubt, but today if a colleague grabs your cheek undesirably it's probably your facial cheek, not the other lace-covered one. That's a good advance in the sake of society and business.

Nontheless 50 years later sex still sells. In this business and in any other. Advertising is all about seduction. It's about getting the client to fall in love not with an agency, but with their company once again. It's about having them see things about their company, their brand and about themselves that they had not felt, recognized or dreamt of before. It's all about making them believe again or as we say in Spanish "ilusionarse de nuevo".

Like in any seduction process, it's not rare to wonder why certain women and men rise to the top. Mad Men has a great scene where Don Draper makes his pitch to the Kodak dudes who are trying to sell their not-so-high-tech slide projector with rational messages of how it functions. Apart from walking in there and seducing them with his voice he gets them at their emotional core with a nostalgic and sentimental TKO.

He says the thing's not a projector, it's a time machine. It takes you back to a time and a place that was good, where you ache to go back to... it's nostalgia with a twist.

In the hey day of Life 2.0, where a new version of everything is coming out every day, the most seductive thing is not novelty. It's nostalgia.

It's what gets you at your core. A memory or a place or a moment that struck you, when you were fresh, young and still an emotional virgin.

Nostalgia is life's way of transporting us back to a safe place. Something we all need when suffering from the constant crush of novelty.