She made flying sexy, made the whole world love New York and was one of the highest-paid women in the world in the 70s. A pioneer in the advertising world and one of the most influential advertising women ever: Mary Wells Lawrence.
Mary Wells Lawrence
Born in 1928 in industrial Youngstown, Ohio, Mary Wells initially moved to New York with a different dream. She wanted to go to drama school to become an actress. That wasn’t to be, but her presentation skills undoubtedly helped later when pitching to clients. She rose from the advertising department at Macy’s to various Mad Men-style agencies, eventually settling at the best of the day – Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) – before founding her own agency in 1966. Wells Rich Greene was then transferred to the New York Stock Exchange, making her the first female CEO of a NYSE company.
She founded her own agency after her male bosses refused to let her break the glass ceiling. It was said that giving a higher position would deter clients from hiring the agency. Lawrence in her biography: “You wouldn’t want to ruin something you’ve built.” At that point I just walked out the door. I wanted my own desk. So I set one up soon after, rented a hotel room as an office and enlisted my mother to answer the phone.”
Unique angle
Before Mary Wells Lawrence, advertisements from airlines like Pan Am and Continental simply showed a Boeing 707. Because at the dawn of commercial aviation, around 1958, the exciting and exotic factor was the airplane itself. And if advertisements showed flight attendants at all, they did so by placing them in a military formation and thereby conveying a feeling of safety. But as the industry grew, a unique angle was needed. Braniff Airlines was a major airline at the time, but the name was barely known to the public. Something that Mary changed with her End of the plain plane campaign. Airplanes were given a nice color and Mary redesigned almost all the campaign material. Not very MeToo-resistant now, but the art direction of the advertisements was inimitable: including flight attendants who took off more and more layers on the way to a warm holiday destination. And Lawrence even went a step further and hired Italian designer Emilio Pucci to design new uniforms. Although you will no longer see airlines advertising with sterwardess lines such as: ‘Coffee, tea or me?’, Lawrence made flying exciting. During her heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, she and her agency, Well Rich Greene, were the advertising architects who mixed entertainment with old-fashioned sales techniques.
I LOVE NEW YORK
However, the campaign that is best known worldwide is that of I ‘heart’ New York. An ‘surgery’ that was necessary when New York was dying in the 70s and 80s. The state and the city were almost bankrupt, and the city was seen as extremely dirty, expensive, full of crime, and a dangerous place to visit. It was high time to change that image, so an advertising agency had to make NY popular again. That honor went to Wells Rich Greene, who created one of the most famous advertising campaigns in history to get New York out of the gutter. Mary & co threw away all the old ideas about tourism and treated the city as a real product that they wanted to ‘sell’. The I Love New York campaign was set up, and part of the campaign eventually became the – now iconic – I Love New York logo, designed by Milton Glaser. It was simple, but effective. And available to everyone, since the New York government had determined that the logo was in the public domain. This meant that any manufacturer or attraction across the state could use it for free to put on merchandise. The campaign worked so well that gas stations sold out of New York State maps. I Love New York bumper stickers started appearing on taxis all over the city – and it wasn’t long before T-shirts appeared as well. There have been countless spin-offs – for everything you can imagine – in every part of the world.
The entire article about Mary Wells Lawrence can be read in the new Elegance. Now in store!
Text: Jorrit Niels | Image: NL Image
