• by John Capone , December 31, 2007

How the Clearasil account might have led to a new nomenclature

Apparently scotch and martinis are the right fuel for the advertising fire. The AMC show Mad Men is mostly known for its hard-driving, hard-drinking, chain-smoking characters. But these guys (and they are almost all guys) shaped, and nearly invented, modern marketing. In the episode titled "The Wheel" (season one), account exec Pete Campbell's father-in-law has just bought Clearasil. Sitting across from Pete in his living room he throws off, "Do you know there's a surge in adolescence right now?"

Of course he knew. (Okay, turns out not so much.) The character goes on to explain to Pete how they should aim to exploit this market and how the Clearasil account can be a boon. But clearly they didn't yet have the terminology for the discussion.

The researchers at Mad Men work overtime to find a factual basis for events in their stories. And the scene is historically accurate. The awkward "surge in adolescence" had been called a baby boom, but the group wasn't referred to as Boomers until years later. Statisticians and census takers might have been the only ones who took serious notice of the spike until the Pete Campbells of the world saw the utility of demography. Though in this case, he might have been a woman.

As early as 1943 a Washington Post article reported that the "wartime boom in babies" caused the War Production Board to order more carriages and strollers. But the boom had only just begun. Typically, Boomers are considered to be the group born between 1946 and 1964.

In 1947 the Post already had a bracket in sight when they interviewed a population expert under a headline that declared, "Baby Boom Temporary." A Newsweek cover story in November 2005 on the Boomers turning 60 mistakenly referred to this article as having been the first usage of "Baby Boomer," but the Post never refers to the tots as Boomers (with an -er), so Newsweek was mistaken. The paper was merely defining a statistical anomaly.

The population spike was recognized as an event and a news story early on and tracked by doctors and scientists, but the bulge was not addressed as a demo. When did marketers get in the mix? They must have seen the potential, but decades would pass before anyone sought to name the segment and identify who they were.

There is some controversy as to just who coined the term Baby Boomer and ascribed it to the postwar generation. Historian, writer and journalist Lanny Jones has frequently claimed to have used it first. His 1980 - when the oldest members of the generation would have been in their early 30s - book Great Expectations was one of the first extended examinations of Boomers and their impact. The title certainly bears out many a Boomer's beef with Tom Brokaw - namely, that they, themselves, are the greatest generation (though they might be more concerned with Brokaw's silly, sappy take on history). At any rate, Jones is clearly among the first to have labeled the babies born right after the end of WWII, Boomers, but who was the very first?

"Florence Skelly, one of the three co-founders of our firm," says J. Walker Smith, Yankelovich president and author of the book Generation Ageless: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Live Today, "is generally credited with coining the term Baby Boomers during the late 1960s, predating Lanny's book by nearly two decades." So maybe it should have been a young Florence Skelly sitting in that chair contemplating how the "surge in adolescence" would affect the Clearasil account on Mad Men. "I used to think this was Yankelovich urban legend," continues Smith, "but when Florence passed away in 1998 she was so credited in her obituary in The New York Times."