Don Draper, Kodak, and the Power of Nostalgia in Marketing

Nostalgia is one of the few marketing strategies that can become more powerful as time passes.

The further we move from a moment, the easier it becomes to remember how that moment made us feel. Childhood toys become collectibles. Old logos suddenly feel comforting. A song you haven't heard in twenty years can transport you to the back seat of your parents' car before you've even consciously remembered where you heard it.

Brands understand this. That's why old packaging comes back, classic jingles reappear, anniversary campaigns borrow from decades-old creative, and franchises continually find ways to introduce one generation's childhood favorites to the next. But nostalgia marketing works best when the past isn't the product. The past gives the product meaning.

Few fictional marketers illustrate that distinction better than Don Draper in one of the most famous scenes from Mad Men: the Kodak Carousel pitch.

As someone who grew up in Rochester, New York, Kodak wasn't simply a company I knew from a marketing textbook. It was a household name. The brand was woven into the identity of the region, which makes watching a fictional advertising agency wrestle with how to sell a Kodak product especially interesting to me. The solution Don arrives at has very little to do with the technology.

In the Season 1 finale of Mad Men, Kodak brings Sterling Cooper a new slide-projector attachment. The product's functional advantage is fairly straightforward: it holds slides in a circular tray and moves through them continuously. The working description centers on the mechanics of the device—the wheel. The episode ultimately turns that utilitarian description into one of Don Draper's defining pitches.

Don doesn't stand in front of the Kodak executives and spend ten minutes explaining the engineering. He starts showing photographs of his family - random moments and holiday memories. A life unfolding one image at a time. He reframes the projector as something closer to a time machine than a piece of office equipment, eventually renaming "the wheel" as the Carousel. The imagery connects the circular motion of the device with childhood, repetition, returning home, and the emotional pull of memory.

Scholars and critics have repeatedly singled out the scene because the product becomes almost secondary to the feelings Don attaches to it. That's what makes the presentation memorable. Kodak walked into the room with a product feature. Don gave them an idea.

One of my Digital Marketing Managers had a printed sign hanging on his office door:

Ideas Sell, so Sell Ideas.

I've thought about that line many times since. It was especially relevant in television, where much of what we sold wasn't tangible. An advertiser couldn't hold a thirty-second commercial in their hands. A sponsorship wasn't something they could place on a shelf. We were selling access to an audience and, more importantly, the possibility that reaching that audience would get someone through the customer's door.

We weren't really selling airtime. We were selling an idea about what that airtime could accomplish. That's exactly what Don does with Kodak.

The Power of Nostalgia Marketing

The most obvious lesson from the Carousel pitch is that nostalgia is powerful. I think there's a more important lesson underneath it: Great communication changes what the audience believes they're looking at.

Kodak's executives already knew what their product did. They didn't need Don to explain how slides worked. What they needed was a reason someone should care. That's the difference between describing a product and positioning one.

Features answer: What does it do?

Positioning answers: What does it mean for me?

The Carousel stores and displays photographs. The idea of the Carousel lets you revisit your daughter's birthday, your first apartment, a family Christmas, the vacation everyone still talks about, or a relative who isn't sitting at the table anymore. Same product - completely different value proposition.

This is where nostalgia becomes much more interesting than simply bringing back an old logo. Effective nostalgia isn't saying, "Remember this?". Effective nostalgia is saying, "Remember who you were when this mattered to you?" That's deeply personal territory. And when a brand genuinely belongs in that memory, the emotional connection can be extraordinarily powerful.

The Real-World Parallel

I'm beginning to see this happen in my own house. I grew up playing Pokémon. When it came time to choose an original starter, I was firmly Team Squirtle. Now I'm introducing Pokémon to my son. His preference? Charmander. I'm willing to forgive this questionable judgment because he has two compelling reasons: he loves dinosaurs, and his favorite color is orange. Charmander had an unfair competitive advantage.

Watching him become interested in something I loved as a kid is fascinating because my reaction isn't really about Pokémon. I'm remembering my Pokémon while watching him discover his Pokémon. Those are two different experiences happening simultaneously.

If I buy him a Charmander toy, part of that purchase is obviously for him.

But another part belongs to me. I'm buying the experience of sharing something from my childhood with my child. That's nostalgia marketing at its best because the old memory isn't simply being reproduced. It's becoming the foundation for a new one.

Nostalgia Doesn't Have to Mean Looking Backward

This is the part marketers sometimes miss. Nostalgia can be forward-looking.

Disney understands this particularly well. An adult who grew up watching Disney movies doesn't necessarily visit a theme park because they want to recreate their childhood exactly as it happened. They may want to experience familiar traditions through their children's eyes. A parent sees a castle and remembers being eight. Their child sees it for the first time at the age of five. The emotional power comes from those two timelines colliding. This builds on an idea I explored in When Marketing Becomes FOMO, where I argued that great marketing helps customers imagine future memories. Nostalgia marketing works from the opposite direction—it reconnects us with the memories we already have.

That's also why legacy entertainment franchises can remain valuable across generations. The strongest ones continually give existing fans something familiar while providing new audiences permission to make the story their own. Charmander doesn't need to replace Squirtle. Apparently they can coexist peacefully under one roof.

Television Sold the Future the Same Way

My years in broadcast taught me another version of this principle. Selling television advertising requires imagination because you're asking a business owner to invest money in something they can't physically inspect. You're selling a possibility:

• More customers walking through the door

• A family deciding where to spend Saturday afternoon

• Someone recognizing the dealership name when it's finally time to buy a car

• A community associating a sponsor with an event they love

That's why "Ideas Sell, so Sell Ideas" resonated with me. The strongest sponsorships weren't spreadsheets with more impressions. They were concepts people could picture.

• A contest

• An experience

• A trusted personality

• A community tradition

A story the advertiser could imagine themselves participating in. Don does essentially the same thing during the Kodak presentation. He lets the clients see the future of the product by showing them the past.

Nostalgia Is Not the Same as Recycling

There's an important warning here. Nostalgia can become lazy.

• A company digs out an old logo

• A fast-food restaurant brings back packaging from 1993

• A commercial recreates an older campaign shot-for-shot

One of my favorite amusement parks does this for one week every summer where they bring back the old jingle on the television and radio ads. Everyone online says, "Oh wow, I remember that!"

Mission accomplished? Not necessarily. Recognition isn't the same as relevance. The strongest nostalgia campaigns use familiar elements to say something meaningful now.

The question shouldn't be: What can we bring back?

It should be: Why does bringing this back matter to the customer today?

That's the difference between honoring brand history and becoming trapped by it. If your entire argument is "You loved us twenty years ago," eventually you're admitting you haven't given customers enough reasons to love you today. Nostalgia should strengthen the present. It shouldn't substitute for one.

Professor Sherwood's Practical Wisdom

When I show this scene to my students, my follow up question is: If you removed the product from your campaign, what idea would remain?

It's an uncomfortable exercise. If the answer is nothing, you may still be describing features rather than communicating value. For Kodak, the answer wasn't "a circular slide tray." It was memory.

For a theme park, it might be belonging. For a running company, it might be accomplishment. For enterprise software, it could be confidence that someone will spot a production problem before it becomes an expensive shutdown.

The product makes the promise possible. But the idea gives the promise meaning. That's especially important when you're communicating something complicated.

I've spent years marketing technology that most people don't wake up excited to discuss: production monitoring, manufacturing systems, supply-chain software, integrations, workflows. Those products still need stories, sometimes more than consumer products do. You have to help the audience picture the world on the other side of the purchase.

• What becomes easier?

• What problem disappears?

• What can they finally accomplish?

• What story will they be able to tell afterward?

That's the power of positioning and effective presentations. And sometimes, a smidge of nostalgia.

So What?

Why use a fictional advertising pitch from a television show set in the 1960s to talk about modern marketing? Because the tools change much faster than people do. Don Draper didn't have TikTok, retargeting, or generative AI producing twenty-five headline variations before lunch. He didn't have marketing automation, behavioral scoring, attribution dashboards, or personalization engines. He understood something every communicator still needs to understand: Information isn't automatically meaningful.

The audience gives it meaning. Your job is to help them make the connection. That's also why the Carousel scene is a public-speaking lesson as much as a marketing lesson. Don doesn't tell the executives, "This presentation should make you emotional." He creates the conditions for emotion. The story does part of the work and the audience completes it using memories of their own.

Great presenters don't simply transfer information. They give audiences enough room to recognize themselves inside the message. That's why nostalgia is so powerful when it's used well. It doesn't just remind us what happened - it reminds us who we were.

Sometimes it gives us an opportunity to take an old story and make it new again. I'll still choose Squirtle. My son can have Charmander. But someday, if we're sitting together playing Pokémon and he chooses that little orange fire-breather because it reminds him of being two years old and discovering Pokémon with his mom, then we'll have created something much more valuable than nostalgia.

We'll have created another memory worth returning to. Ideas sell. So sell ideas. That's the story behind the strategy.

The Power of Nostalgia.