The instinct that built an era
In the TV show Mad Men, Don Draper built his career on instinct. He could read a room, feel a story, and turn a product into a promise people believed. The first season is set in 1960, a time when advertising was built on print, radio, and magazine work.
By 1970, as Mad Men concludes, that simpler advertising world is long gone. Television owns the culture. Social and political upheaval have fractured the audience. Data and psychology are tightening their grip on the advertising creative process. Focus groups are pushing instinct aside. The medium has changed, the audience has changed, and Don’s certainty in his own creative dominance fades with each season.
Then comes the final scene: Don writes the Coca-Cola Hilltop ad – a sublime TV moment, not a print one. The skill that survived wasn’t layout or copy mechanics. It was the ability to see people clearly and turn that into a story and emotion. The medium shifted. He adjusted. The experience he built over the years didn’t evaporate — it carried him to the hilltop of a new medium.
A similar shift is reshaping SEO careers
That same shift is hitting today’s veteran organic search marketers. The ground under us is shifting just as quickly – only compressed into months instead of years.
The early 2000s web was our Madison Avenue. Once you learned the system — how to structure a site, how to write for intent and an algorithm, how to earn links — the results were steady, repeatable, and almost tactile.
That steadiness is gone now. Search results move constantly, shaped by AI models, knowledge graphs, product grids, and a parade of SERP features that update faster than most teams can react. The old “keyword map” looks more like a neural web than a list.
Chasing change vs. carrying experience forward
The instinct is to chase whatever flashes this month – prompts, schema shortcuts, or whichever AI-driven layer decides to redraw the SERP for a week. But that’s the Harry Crane path: early to the medium, thin on judgment. He understood the channel. He never understood the people using it. And that’s where experience still separates the Don Drapers from the Harry Cranes.
What matters now is the experience Don earned the hard way – the patterns he recognized, the misses he learned from, and the timing he developed from years of doing the work. That’s the part that carries across mediums.
Those are the skills that rise when the chaos settles. Not the ones chasing every new format or trying to own the acronym of the month, but the ones the new formats eventually need. As SEO’s, it’s been a lot of years since our Hilltop 😉 but have faith – our experience is transferable, valuable,and not easily replaced.
Because mediums change. Experience doesn’t.
