AMC, Deep Focus Bring Back Enhanced 'Mad Men Yourself'

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AMC TV has revived its popular Mad Men Yourself site to build buzz for the premiere of the series' fourth season on July 25.

Mad Men Yourself lets users create an avatar in the style of the show's animated opening sequence. Those avatars can be sent to friends or used as profile pictures on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Deep Focus, a digital agency in New York, helped build the site for AMC.

This year, Mad Men Yourself offers new backgrounds, clothes and accessories for avatars, allowing users to grapple with the same changes in culture and fashion that affect the show's characters.

Neither the agency nor AMC was able to immediately provide up-to-date statistics, but Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer said at the Social Ad Summit in New York last year that the original site had garnered 1 million unique visitors, 600,000 of whom created avatars. The premiere of the series' third season last year drew 2.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen. That's not a huge number for a well-known cable series - USA's Burn Notice averages 6 million viewers, and HBOs True Blood averages 4 million - but the show has won back-to-back Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series and attracts an unusually affluent, well-educated following.

Mad Men Yourself closely resembles 20th Century Fox's Simpsonize Me, a site that the studio used to promote the opening of The Simpsons Movie in 2007. That site, however, has not been updated since its launch.

Follow Douglas Quenqua on Twitter at @DQuenqua.