What cigarette ads can teach us about developer marketing

I once took a college class on Mad Men, which at the time felt like an indulgence. I was a computer science student who thought marketing was basically smoke and mirrors.

The longer I’ve worked alongside founders—often at the stage where they’re still figuring out how to describe what they’re building—the more I think about that class, and how marketing (even developer marketing) is really about psychology.

If you look at the ads that defined Don Draper’s era, the psychology is hard to miss. The cigarette ads are the clearest case. They couldn’t make a rational argument for the product, so they leaned entirely on the myths people already cared about. They conjured a world someone might want to inhabit, and the cigarette was simply in the frame.

Merit and myth

Founders, especially technical founders, like to believe their products will win on merit. And often they do. Developer tools in particular live or die on real performance and real tradeoffs.

But merit is never evaluated in isolation. It’s filtered through a story about what good work looks like.

Developers like to imagine themselves as uniquely rational consumers. We compare benchmarks and talk about first principles. And yet this is the same community that can sustain decade-long wars over programming languages, editors, framework philosophies, operating systems, even keyboard layouts.

Underpinning those debates are stories about what “good engineering” looks like—myths in the classical sense, shared narratives that help people locate themselves.

When a developer evaluates a tool, they’re asking technical questions, of course. But they’re also asking existential ones:

• Is this the kind of work I respect?
• Is this how serious teams operate?
• Do these people think about problems the way I do, or the way I aspire to?

We like to think we’re choosing tools. More often, we’re choosing the kind of builder we want to be.

Cigarette ads were an extreme case—psychology operating almost in a vacuum. Developer tools and SaaS products certainly have more substance. But the psychological layer still runs alongside the evaluation. It influences which tradeoffs feel acceptable, which abstractions feel elegant versus limiting.

Content as world-building

Most companies treat content as a means to an end. They write to explain features or support sales. But content has a sneaky way of doing more than just informing and instructing. It is always, no matter what it’s about, exposing your standards.

The way you frame problems reveals what you care about. The examples you choose reveal what you admire. The shortcuts you tolerate reveal what you consider acceptable.

Developers notice all of this. Everything you publish, from release notes to the CTO’s LinkedIn, reinforces your worldview, and the likelihood (or not) that someone believes in it.

Cigarette ads proved that people choose worlds before they choose products, and the same is true for developer marketing. The myths that you align yourself with, or create for the first time, are just as powerful (and just as real) as any feature list.

Technical founders often ask whether they’re doing content the right way. The better question is simpler: are you painting a compelling world for your customers?