Madison Avenue

noun

1. a street in New York City that is a center of the advertising and public relations industries and that has become a symbol of their attitudes, methods, and practices.

Madison Avenue

noun

1. a street in New York City: a centre of American advertising and public-relations firms and a symbol of their attitudes and methods

Madison Avenue

1. A street in Manhattan on which many advertising and public relations firms have offices.

Notes

“Madison Avenue hype” carries the connotation of misrepresentation or deliberate dishonesty.

The name of the street is often used to refer to the high-pressure techniques of the advertising business.

Example Sentences

Instead, a Manhattan real-estate developer bought a 20-foot chunk of the Berlin Wall for display near Madison Avenue, a sight barely noticed by busy shoppers.

From Salon

In another routine, titled “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” Newhart imagined a phone conversation between Lincoln and his press agent just before the president delivered his famous speech at Gettysburg.

From Los Angeles Times

Mary Wells Lawrence, who grew up in Ohio, at 22 took her imagination and ambition to New York, where she broke through advertising’s male bastions of the 1960s, quit a prestigious job when she was denied a presidency, founded her own agency and dazzled Madison Avenue with vivid campaigns that became embedded in American culture.

From New York Times

And it was a keen reminder that Madison Avenue’s concerns about TikTok, which center on how to cleverly market their products and ensure that consumers are seeing their ads, are vastly different from those of Washington, where officials consider the app a national security risk.

From New York Times

In addition to his athletic gifts, he had what Newsweek’s Pete Axthelm called “an expanding, well-rounded personality” that was attractive to Hollywood moguls and Madison Avenue advertisers.

From Los Angeles Times