This is Mill Street Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball.

Today we're sitting down with Irish baker, Shari Denham.

Growing up in Northern Ireland gave Shari a first-hand education in Irish cooking, baking,

and of course, hospitality.

You never walk into a house in Ireland without being offered a cup of tea on something nice

to eat. My daddy always used to say, a cup of tea is awful wet without anything else, isn't it?

That's coming up later on the show. First, we're getting an insider's look at food advertising.

The television show Mad Men gave us fictional campaigns for brands like Popsicle, Uts, Potato Chips, and Heinz.

It's clean, it's simple, and it's tantalizingly incomplete.

What's missing?

One thing.

Pass the Heinz.

You mean the Heinz ketchup?

It's Heinz.

It only means one thing.

To find out the real stories behind some of the most and least successful food ads,

I'm joined now by a Madison Avenue veteran Jeff Swiston.

Jeff, welcome back to Melstreet. What a pleasure. It's great to be back, looking forward to this.

So before we get into examples, tell me a little bit about your experiences in the advertising

business and on Madison Avenue. Yeah, so, you know, through my advertising and branding work, I worked with a branding agency

and then went to DDB, one of the larger ad agencies.

And through my career, I've had the pleasure of working on McDonald's and finding out

...