High Flyin’ Advertisin’

Review by Mike Gange

A Big Life In Advertising
Mary Wells Lawrence
Knopf, $37.95, 307 pages.

Mary Wells Lawrence may not be a household name, but what she has done in the advertising world has touched the collective consciousness of most North Americans. Mrs. Wells is the creative force behind many well known advertising campaigns, like "At Ford, Quality is Job One," "Nobody beats Midas. Nobody," and the much copied "I love NY" replacing the word love with the stylized red heart.

Although married twice, Mary Wells Lawrence (nee Berg) went by the name of her first husband throughout her professional life. As founder of the New York based advertising firm Wells Rich Greene, Mary Wells was directly involved in many ad campaigns and promotions influencing consumer spending and behaviour for more than three decades. Her inspiration led to Braniff Airways gaining widespread marketplace recognition for its colourfully painted airplane exteriors at a time when most airlines were either silver or painted white. Her input successfully helped the campaign team keep the electorate focused on the accomplishments of N.Y. Governor Nelson Rockefeller as he was seeking re-election rather than on his messy and well publicized divorce. Her groundbreaking print advertisement put American Motors’ Javelin side by side with Ford’s Mustang and led to more sales of Javelins than American Motors ever predicted. From her ad agency Wells Rich Greene came memorable ad campaigns like "Flick Your Bic" for Bic Lighters and "America’s Favorite Cigarette Break" where an extra long Benson & Hedges cigarette was demolished by elevator doors.

A Big Life In Advertising is a remarkable tale. Mary Wells was an only child, born into a family environment more stifling than creative. Her uncommunicative father would withdraw from humans, preferring to work in his basement or garden. Her mother never felt satisfied in terms of personal development. Still, in the 1950's, Mary Berg, who became Mrs. Wells following a short-lived marriage, found work as an advertising copywriter in a department store in her home area of Youngstown, Ohio. Barely in her twenties, she married and moved with her husband to New York, rising quickly through progressively larger and more upscale stores as an ad writer, eventually becoming copy chief of the prestigious Macy’s Department Store. In the 1960's headhunters lured Mrs. Wells to ad agency McCann Erickson, where she continued to sharpen her creative writing skills. A couple of other career moves followed, each better than the one before. It was during that time that she created the Braniff Airways colour campaign and handled the Alka-Seltzer promotion.

Interestingly, it was Mrs. Wells who got Miles Pharmaceuticals to update the ads which once featured the animated cartoon figure "Speedy" selling the stomach tablets. Mrs. Wells writes that she was working with a research doctor named Dorothy Carter "who demonstrated to us that in order for aspirin to break through the pain barrier it often required two aspirins, not one, to do the job. As aspirin is one of the ingredients that make Alka-Seltzer effective, we asked her if two Alka-Seltzers would work better than one. Yes, two would work better than one. But the directions on the packages said to take only one. And all the old Speedy commercials demonstrated only one fizzing in water...We changed the directions and began to show two Alka-Seltzers dropping into a glass of water in every commercial. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Miles began selling twice as much Alka-Seltzer," Mrs. Wells writes.

By 1966, Mary Wells had had enough tutelage to feel confident about opening her own ad agency, called Wells Rich Greene. Founder, president and later CEO of the first publicly traded company to be headed by a woman, Mrs. Wells became a role model for women in business at a time when every other ad agency was run by men. Mrs. Wells was not only a strong-willed leader, but she was also driven by highly developed ethics. By 1972, her agency had billings worth $150 billion. At one point during that time she did the unthinkable, handing in her company’s resignation to a huge TWA account worth more than $30 million annually. Wells Rich Greene was about to buy out a Texas based agency that already represented Continental Airlines, and Mrs. Wells felt the potential conflict of interest was not in the best interests of her clients or her new staff.

Mary Wells Lawrence shows us how attitude makes all the difference in one’s altitude. Some of the best parts of her story tell how she and her staff won over huge accounts with ingenuity and chutzpah, while other agencies jealously predicted (and hoped) she would only fail. Also absolutely fascinating are descriptions of the process of creating an ad campaign. But at times, Mrs. Wells’ writing style is disappointing. She is too breathlessly wordy, too much like a practiced copywriter, purposely using bad grammar and no punctuation in run-on sentences, to achieve a calculated emotional response.

Mary Wells Lawrence has certainly had an impact on our popular culture, through the ad campaigns she created for print and television. A Big Life In Advertising lets us get to know her a little better.

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.