Don Draper Life Cereal Pitch Parodies

Submission 24,647

Part of a series on Mad Men. [View Related Entries]

About

Don Draper Life Cereal Pitch Parodies refers to a series of exploitable image parodies based on a scene from the American dramatic television series Mad Men. In the scene, the lead character Don Draper attempts to sell an advertising campaign for Life cereal while drunk. Online, people replace the image for Life cereal with references to other public relations and advertising blunders as well as ridiculous or absurd ideas.

Origin

On August 29th, 2010, AMC^[1] aired the episode of the television series Mad Men entitled "Waldorf Stories." During the episode, the main character Don Draper wins a prestigious advertising award, and while riding on the high of winning, he decides to pitch a campaign to Life cereal while drunk. Draper then pitches while visibly intoxicated. This moment of him attempting to maintain composure in front of a white board is the inspiration for the meme. On May 24th, 2011, YouTuber ^[2] ryleeryno posted the scene to YouTube, receiving more than 279,000 views in six years.

Two years later, on March 21st, 2012, Uproxx^[3] published a list entitled "If Don Draper Handled Modern Marketing." Within the list of parody pitches by Don Draper, the author included an image from "Waldorf Stories," with the logo for Netflix and the word Qwikster, Netflix's botched DVD mailer rebranding (shown below). This post is the earliest example of the meme available.

Spread

On August 11th, 2015, a Redditor, ^[4] whose account has been deleted, posted a version (shown below) of the meme with the words "My X is a mess" around the word "Life."

The following year, on June 28th, 2016, Twitter^[6] user @ollymoss tweeted the image of Draper with an ad for the audiobook subscription service Audible. They captioned the post "The image in my head every time I see a real stinker of an ad." The post (shown below, left) received more than 30 retweets and 260 likes.

On January 5th, 2017, Twitter^[5] user @stodgeoff posted a variation with the words "The pope but he's young" on the board. The post (shown below, center) received more than 1,300 retweets and 3,400 likes.

Seven months later, on July 23rd, Instagram ^[7] user @thedanknetwork posted a version with the words "air bud except he's gay this time" on the board. Several days later, Redditor PapaSodeyPops posted the meme on /r/MemeEconomy, where it received more than 950 points (97% upvoted).