Perhaps no one will miss Mad Men more than the real-life mad men and women in today's advertising industry.

When the hit series ended its seven-season run last week, Mad Men left the industry in a different place than it was in 2007, when Don Draper first quipped about selling happiness and love along with nylons. By using the advertising business as a backdrop for its painstakingly rendered journey into the past, the show had a marked influence on the way the public sees advertising and how advertising professionals see themselves.

It's no surprise the show enjoyed a dedicated following among the men and women of the industry it chronicled. Three-martini lunches and smoke-filled board rooms may be relics of a bygone era, but today's ad professionals found plenty to relate to in the workplace dramas of Sterling Cooper's employees.

Besides Mad Men, there are very few TV shows or movies that faithfully represent the ad business, execs said. The series was the first accurate, if somewhat glamorized, glimpse many Americans had into the sausage-making of creating and selling ads.

"Before this, all we had was Bewitched," says DDB North American president Mark O'Brien.

Several ad executives told Mashable that when Mad Men was at its best, it reminded them why they got into the business in the first place.

A now-famous clip in which Don Draper pitches a Kodak slide projector as a nostalgic time machine — a play on the word Carousel — resonated with current advertising power brokers because it showed how a single transformative idea could change the way the world sees a product.

"That's still the magic in what we do," O'Brien says. "I think it helped rekindle that feeling of pride and understanding that what we are really doing is trying to touch people's emotions."

Better than Bewitched, for the advertising industry at least.

Every profession has what sociologists call an "occupational mythology," a romanticized notion of the job's character that injects a sense of purpose beyond a paycheck and draws in new blood. Personal failings aside, Draper's maverick creative genius persona embodied that spirit for advertising.

Making advertising cool

The allure of the sweeping monologues, culture-shaping ideas and inter-agency power plays that made up work at Sterling Cooper has given the industry a new glitz in the eyes of the public.

Lou Aversano, New York CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, says his agency got a noticeable bump in job applicants at the height of Mad Men popularity. (He also credits the simultaneous financial crisis that deterred job-seekers from banking careers.)

Students cited Mad Men as a reason for choosing an advertising major, and professors worked scenes into lesson plans.

"It created a little bit of an aura of glamor that we really need today," O'Brien says. "Because if you think about who we're recruiting against, we're up against the Googles of the world, the Facebooks of the world."

For many students, the growth of Mad Men characters like Peggy served as a lesson in how to become tough quickly in a professional environment. Image: AMC

And naturally, it inspired the occasional case of life imitating art for real-world Don Drapers.

"I actually had never developed a taste for Scotch, bourbon or whiskey in my entire life, but over the last several years, I've slowly worked my way into it just because it looked so frickin' good on the show," says Ari Halper, creative director at Grey New York.

Before Mad Men, more people tended to look down their noses at advertising, many execs said.

"We’ve been told that people in advertising are as trustworthy as used car salesmen for 20 years," Jason De Turris, chief strategy officer at Crispin Porter+Bogusky, told Mashable in an email.

That was before Draper, the chisel-jawed, sharp-dressed wizard of spin, entered America's living rooms and sold a new perspective.

"I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent," Draper lectured to a stoned hippie in Season 1.

In some ways, Draper occupies the same anti-hero status to real-life Madison Avenue that Gordon Gekko did for Wall Street in Oliver Stone's classic film, Haper said.

"I think there is a catharsis there for sure. The fact that he is unlikeable and detestable allows you to get out your dark side. It allows you to live out the things that you wish you could say to clients," Halper said. "I mean he's very much pure id."

But at the same time, Draper's less appealing qualities may have served as something of a reality check for some outsized creative personalities, Halper said.

It's not pure coincidence, he speculates, that creative directors began to noticeably reign in their bravado when Mad Men first took off.

"There's no longer these Kanye-sized egos. Those types of creative directors are starting to become rapidly extinct," Halper said. "Perhaps it was holding up Draper as a mirror to these people that they had a sort of 'I don't want to be like that' reaction."

Kanye West takes the microphone from singer Taylor Swift as she accepts the "Best Female Video" award during the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009 in New York. Image: Jason DeCrow/Associated Press

A growing legacy

Of course, today's Madison Avenue bears only a passing resemblance to the one depicted in the show.

Besides the obvious changes in office culture, the rise of digital technology has diluted the clout of traditional heavyweight agencies, and print and television ads have ceded ground to social media, online content and the countless other communication channels now at advertisers' disposal.

Casual chauvinism may no longer be acceptable, but women remain woefully underrepresented in advertising's upper echelons and creative departments. Females constituted just 11% of all winners of creative awards last year — up from 4% a decade ago.

Even 50 years after Mad Men, the advertising industry has few women. Image: AMC

That number will need to change as diversity becomes more important to the industry than ever. Mad Men might harken back to a golden age of creativity, but the range of ideas was limited by the homogeneity of the workforce, said Craig Moore, creative director at Indianapolis-based Found Search Marketing.

"We get so much sharper, better communications because we are really taking into account people from all these groups — whether it's race, sex, or interest or whatever that might be," Moore said. "It's not the sort of super singular smoky-room boys club like it used to be."

Denise Blasevick, founder and CEO of S3 Agency, said advertisers must constantly interact with consumers and deal with exponentially more data.

"There is much less like 'don't look at the man behind the curtain'—much less of the Oz effect," Blasevick said. "It's not just one ad guy in a room drinking and coming up with some idea."

Still, Aversano says the legacy Mad Men left behind will only continue to grow well beyond the show's finale.

"It will have more of a role in culture to define the industry because it was so well done. I think you'll just see that grow in importance as time marches on." Aversano said. "You won't see the impact of that now, you'll see it later."