Mad Men
| Fandom | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Mad Men |
| Abbreviation(s): | |
| Creator: | Matthew Weiner |
| Date(s): | 2007 - present |
| Medium: | television (cable) |
| Country of Origin: | United States |
| External Links: | AMC official site |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Mad Men is an American television drama series created by Matthew Weiner that first aired on AMC in 2007. The show is set in the New York City of the early 1960s, at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on Madison Avenue, and centers on Don Draper, a high-level advertising executive. Much of the narrative is devoted to exploring the changing social mores of mid-twentieth century America, including the expanding status of and options available to women.
Mad Men Fandom
This article or section needs expansion. |
Although the show is very popular, the creative fandom is relatively small.
- We Are Sterling Cooper, twitter
- stories on AO3 (126 as of October 2012)
- stories on FanFiction.Net (80 as of October 2012)
- Mad Men Episode Reviews, Archived version by yourlibrarian
Controversies
The Social Media Examiner did a video interview with Carri Bugbee about fan fiction and social media as a brand issue for creators. She was unfamiliar with fan fiction when she began tweeting as the Mad Men character Peggy Olson, so she seemed unaware there was a particular term for cosplay or what she and the other characters do, RPG. She agreed that some people believed that the RPG was a campaign by AMC, Mad Men's network, especially as Twitter was not well known at the time. She explained though that she was more a fan of Twitter than Mad Men so that her participation was more of a social experiment. However, AMC's response was to suspend the Twitter accounts of the RPG participants only a week after they began tweeting together. She described angry fan reaction, and how the accounts were restored in 24 hours with the request that participants should contact AMC's digital marketing department. Her takeaway for companies is that if they don't manage their characters across the web, that others would and the results might not be what the brands would want. The way she approached her participation was to avoid doing anything she wouldn't do if she were getting paid for the job. The interviewer suggested that fan activities were a boon for brands as they were free advertising, but Bugbee warned that fans could not necessarily be co-opted and might be doing things brands didn't like, so they should be bribed with attention and goodies from the brand owners. She concluded that given the usual marketing costs, these expenses would "be nothing."
References