When you think of chocolate, the first company you think about is Hershey's. But Hershey's didn't always advertise -- in fact, in the first 70 years of its existence, it didn't need to.

You're the God of a market when you dominate that much of market share and don't need to advertise at all. That's the position Hershey's was in until 1969, when Mars and M&M came up as very serious competition.

"Hershey's isn't serious. They don't advertise. They never have," Don Draper said about Hershey's in Mad Men.

Hershey's was a brand of chocolate so universal and iconic that it didn't need to be advertised, but that didn't mean it didn't market. It still reached out to supermarkets and cared for its distribution. The Mad Men scene and pitch about Hershey's was one of the most important in the show, and Hershey's actually was flattered by being included in the pitch.

Anna Lingeris, the senior manager of brand P.R. and consumer engagement at Hershey's, said she had no idea how the brand would be represented in the season finale.

"Oftentimes, companies will call and ask us to donate product across the board for potential inclusion," Lingeris explained. "So that was the extent of the knowledge. We had donated product, but we had no idea about its inclusion in the show or the season finale."

Lingeris said that the company was thrilled about its inclusion in Mad Men, that the clip was the buzz of the office on that given day and that the pitch that went badly for Don Draper's company was actually a "wonderful, organic moment that was actually very accurate about the company's history."

No chocolate will ever match the reputation of Hershey's as a mainstay of the American imagination. The product has remained reliably consistent, with a heavy emphasis on the quality and pure taste of its chocolate as well as the positive emotions behind the consumption of the chocolate.

But Hershey's was not always America's chocolate and required a lot oft rial and error to become such a household brand. In 1894, when Milton Hershey founded the company, he tried to make the company have more luxurious chocolates, and now it's a chocolate that's cheap and ready for public consumption. Hershey's has always emphasized its product above all else, Hershey's has emphasized how the chocolate has made the product. Hershey's comes as not only pure chocolate, but accessible chocolate at that.

Hershey's dominated the market of chocolate because it was the only chocolate int the market. Once Mars came out with its own variety of chocolate candies like Milky Way, M&M's, and Snickers, Hershey's had to start to advertise.

Part of what made Milton Hershey so successful was luck, a luck that his chocolate bars were so successful that he built his own company town in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He had a belief in the effect of comfortable working conditions on staff morale. In World War II, the company developed a special non-melting bar for troops serving overseas, and Hershey himself created the Milton Hershey School, a school for local orphans, which is why Don Draper as an orphan found so much appeal in Milton Hershey's school.

Hershey's efforts have become so iconic that September 13, Milton Hershey's birthday, is International Chocolate Day. What Hershey did was make chocolate an accessible candy and luxury. Despite initially creating more luxury chocolates, Hershey started to pivot its factories to make chocolate affordable to everyone, when chocolate was essentially seen as a luxury item. When Hershey passed away, he entrusted all his wealth to the company, the school, and the town.

So not only was Hershey a great businessman, but he was a stand-up philanthropist who cared about his employees and ethics, values that seem to be absent and make people cynical of CEOs in this day and age.

The fact that Hershey's didn't need to advertise was well-deserved. Of course, since 1969, it has had to adapt to the competition, but Hershey's revolutionized the world of chocolate and its market.

Don Draper, an orphan that grew up in a brothel, called Hershey's chocolate "the only sweet thing in my life." And it was the only sweetest thing for far too many kids.

That's how powerful the Hershey bar was, and why the brand didn't need to advertise itself.