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One of advertising’s all-time greats, Mary Wells Lawrence, shows
us the American ad world from the 1950s through the 1980s in all its
brilliance, excitement, fun and craziness.
She captures the
thrill of being a young copywriter in the 1960s at Doyle Dane Bernbach,
working for the dazzling, revolutionary Bill Bernbach (“There was
something volcanic [about him] . . . a little like being in the company
of Mao or Che or the young Fidel”); how he took on a car rental
firm that barely existed, announced to the world it was Number Two and
therefore it tried harder—and overnight made the unknown Avis
second only to the mighty Hertz; how Bernbach’s “Think
Small” campaign made big car–obsessed America fall in love
with the unlikely Volkswagen; how his Polaroid ads explained the
mysterious instant camera to the public without saying a
word.
She writes about leaving Doyle Dane Bernbach (for seven
years her Heaven on earth) for a new ad company, and how she made it her
own, producing the simple and unforgettable “Plop Plop Fizz
Fizz” Alka-Seltzer commercial by getting rid of the cartoon
tablet, Speedy, and creating a frothy, luminous commercial composed of
nothing but two Alka-Seltzers dropping into a crystal glass of water;
how she gave Braniff Airways brilliant visibility by painting its
airplanes fresh, vivid colors—and then fell in love with and
married the head of the company.
She writes about her campaign
for the French tourist bureau and how she used a single image—a
country man on a bicycle—that today is still the symbol of
France’s rural life . . . how she traveled the world for Betty
Crocker’s casserole dishes, how she brought theatricality and
fantasy to TV advertising.
She tells how she started Wells Rich
Greene and ran it like a movie studio. She writes about the clients and
the campaigns . . . how she created a new line of
cosmetics—Love—for a conservative drug company (it became
one of the most successful cosmetics launches in history) . . . how she
helped save American Motors from bankruptcy, redesigned its cars and put
together an ad campaign that did the unthinkable—compared its
unknown Javelin with Ford’s beloved Mustang . . . how Midas was
“Midasized”. . . how, when thousands of Ford dealers had
gone out of business, the Ford ads focused not on Ford’s cars
but on the dedication of its workers, with the slogan “Quality is
Job One”; how she made New York the place to be when it was seen
as a sinking ship, with the slogan “I Love New
York.”
She writes about taking Wells Rich Greene public and
how she became the first woman CEO of a company on the New York Stock
Exchange . . . how she made a movie with the last of the Hollywood
moguls, Jack Warner. She tells how she transformed a dilapidated,
once-famous villa, La Fiorentina, at Cap Ferrat (a Nazi stronghold
during the war) into a Mediterranean Eden, and writes about her battle
with cancer. She talks about her refusal to globalize Wells Rich Greene
and her decision, finally, to sell the company she’d built into
the fastest-growing ad agency in history, and what happened to it
afterward.
Here is the extraordinary story of how Mary Wells
Lawrence lived her life in advertising—helped shape her
profession, was shaped by it and left her mark on it.
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