On May 13, 1998, after 32 years of operation, the advertising agency Wells Rich Greene officially closed its doors. The woman who founded it was not present. She had sold the agency eight years earlier for $160 million and disappeared into a life of private grandeur.
Mary Wells Lawrence had been the first woman to found, own, and run a major national advertising agency. She was the first female CEO of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. During the 1970s, she was the highest-paid executive in the entire advertising industry.
She created campaigns still embedded in American culture. The heart shape in I Love New York. The fizz of Alka-Seltzer. The bright painted planes of Braniff International. The Ford workers’ pride in “Quality is Job One.”
She walked out of her own industry at 61 because, as she put it, “Advertising changed. It got big and boring. Otherwise, I would probably still be in advertising.”
Mary Georgine Berg grew up in Poland, Ohio, a small town near Youngstown. She was a painfully shy only child who spent much of her childhood in the local library. Her father, Walter Berg, was a furniture salesman.
In 1940, when she was 12, he took her to New York City to study method acting. That experience shaped her entire approach to advertising. She believed every advertisement should be a mini drama and every product the star of its own story.
She studied drama at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, now Carnegie Mellon. She did not study marketing or advertising. Her foundation was theater.
She began her career in 1951 as a copywriter for McKelvey’s department store in Youngstown. By 1952, she had moved to New York, landing a job as fashion advertising manager at Macy’s.
Her path followed the typical ladder. She worked at McCann Erickson from 1953 to 1956, then at Lennen & Newell with rapid advancement.
Her personal life was turbulent. She divorced Burt Wells in 1952, remarried him in 1954, and divorced him again in 1965.
The seven years she spent at Doyle Dane Bernbach, from 1957 to 1964, were, in her own words, her “heaven on earth.” Bill Bernbach, the agency’s co-founder, was a transformative figure. She described him as “something volcanic, a little like being in the company of Mao or Che or the young Fidel.”
Bernbach’s core belief was that the truth was in the product. Interrogate it, find its essence, and communicate that essence with honest, witty, emotionally resonant storytelling.
In 1964, she moved to Jack Tinker and Partners, a creative think tank within the Interpublic Holding Company. There, the assignment arrived that changed everything.
Braniff International Airways needed a very big idea. Wells Lawrence walked into Braniff’s offices and told the airline its terminals looked like a prison camp. Its planes were drab. Its flight attendants were dressed to look like nurses.
The solution was brilliant. She brought in architect and textile designer Alexander Girard and Italian fashion legend Emilio Pucci. Girard redesigned over 17,000 elements of the airline, from airplane livery to sugar packets. The fleet was painted in bold, vibrant colors.
Pucci created the flight attendants’ uniforms, a multi-piece layered ensemble designed to come off in stages during the flight. Wells cleverly named it the “air strip” in the advertising copy.
The campaign was launched with a press unveiling that drew 300 reporters. The tagline was “The End of the Plain Plane.” The rebrand was credited as a critical factor in Braniff’s turnaround.
The campaign also introduced Wells to Harding Lawrence on a personal level. They fell in love. She married him in Paris in November 1967 in a civil ceremony at the town hall of the 8th arrondissement.
The marriage raised ethical questions. She was the wife of a major client’s chairman and the agency executive serving that client.
The Braniff success made Wells Lawrence the hottest creative talent in American advertising. The head of Interpublic told her he would give her presidential authority at Tinker but not the title because a woman could not win acceptance as president.
She described his final words with characteristic precision. “He could see that I was feeling a red rage and he said you would not want to ruin something you built. And at that point I just walked out the door.”
In April 1966, Wells, along with Richard Rich and Stewart Green, left Tinker simultaneously. They agreed to form their own agency with Braniff International as the sole founding client.
Wells Rich Greene opened for business on April 4, 1966. At a time when women did not found major advertising agencies, the founding was a seismic event on Madison Avenue.
Within five years, annual billings exceeded $100 million. In 1968, WRG went public on the New York Stock Exchange, making Wells Lawrence the first female CEO of a company traded on the big board.
At its height, the agency managed $885 million in worldwide billings. She ran it with an approach shaped by her theater background, treating the agency like a movie studio.
“The best advertising should make you nervous about what you are not buying,” she said.
Charlie Moss, her long-time creative director, described her as to Madison Avenue what Muhammad Ali was to boxing. She was unapologetic. “If people were not crying, screaming, and yelling, we rarely got big ideas,” she said.
The Alka-Seltzer campaigns became among the most beloved in advertising history. One of her most commercially shrewd moves was the insight that showing two tablets dissolving would get consumers into the habit of taking two instead of one. It doubled sales.
Later WRG campaigns produced the taglines “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” “Try it, you will like it,” and the immortal “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is.”
For Benson & Hedges, Wells Lawrence found comedy in the product’s awkward reality. The unusually long cigarettes were shown accidentally setting beards on fire, popping balloons, and getting crushed by elevator doors. Sales grew from 1 billion cigarettes in 1966 to 14 billion in 1970.
She later expressed regret. “I would not do it now. Based on the knowledge we have today, we would make a different decision.”
When Ford was struggling under the Pinto exploding gas tank scandal, Henry Ford II turned to Wells Lawrence. Her answer was counterintuitive. Instead of advertising the cars, advertise the people.
The “Quality is Job One” campaign focused on the dedication and craftsmanship of Ford’s workers. It became one of the most enduring taglines in automotive history.
For Bic lighters, she created “Flick your Bic.” For Sure deodorant, she created “Raise your hand if you’re Sure.” For the Ad Council, she created “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”
By 1977, New York City was in crisis. It faced financial insolvency. Crime was rampant. Tourism had collapsed. Broadway theaters were empty.
The New York State Commerce Department hired WRG to design a campaign to revitalize the city’s image. The initial budget was only $400,000.
WRG developed the I Love New York slogan. Graphic designer Milton Glaser sketched the iconic I heart NY logo in the back of a taxi on his way to a campaign meeting, reportedly on a scrap of paper torn from an envelope. The original doodle is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
The campaign included television commercials featuring Frank Sinatra and Broadway icon Yul Brynner. Three months after launch, Broadway attendance jumped from 20% to 90%.
The campaign worked beyond all expectation. It became one of the most recognized and imitated place branding campaigns in the history of marketing.
Wells Lawrence understood that her physical appearance in a male-dominated industry was a terrain to be managed. “I have carefully been ladylike,” she said. “I have carefully looked as much as possible like somebody a male executive would be comfortable with in a sister or a wife, so that he stops seeing me.”
In the 1980s, the trade press began calling her Garbo because of her long, unexplained absences from the agency. The real reason was something she had deliberately concealed.
She was fighting both uterine cancer and later breast cancer. She hid her illness because she did not want other agencies to use the fact as a way of destroying the confidence of her clients.
She fought the disease in private, maintained the public image of invincibility, and continued to run an agency billing $885 million a year while undergoing treatment.
By 1990, Wells Lawrence was 61 and the head of the nation’s 15th largest agency. The industry had changed around her in ways she found fundamentally alienating.
The mega mergers of the 1980s had produced enormous bureaucratic holding companies that prioritized scale over creativity. In 1990, she sold WRG to the French group BDDP for $160 million and retired simultaneously.
The post-Lawrence story of WRG was a swift and painful collapse. The agency was acquired by BDDP, then GGT Group of London in 1996, then Omnicom in 1997.
Clients defected. Procter & Gamble departed in January 1998. Three months later, the agency closed.
Wells Lawrence later lamented, “I should have put some of the creative talent I had into cloning myself. The ending might have been different if I had worked harder at that.”
The decade following her retirement was characterized by what one journalist described as her being a veritable recluse from her industry. But the reclusion was not inactivity.
She and Harding Lawrence purchased Villa La Fiorentina, a Palladian-style estate on the Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat peninsula in the south of France. It drew Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, and Henry Ford II for three decades of parties.
They also acquired the Terraces on Mustique, a 13-bedroom estate on 17 acres at the highest point of the island, later reported to be worth $200 million. It towered above their neighbor Mick Jagger’s villa.
Maurice Saatchi, who knew her well, said, “If Mary had decided to go into politics instead of advertising, she would have been America’s first female president.”
In 2002, Harding Lawrence died of pancreatic cancer. Wells Lawrence simultaneously published her memoir, A Big Life in Advertising.
In a five-hour interview with USA Today, her first in-depth newspaper interview since 1966, she spoke with characteristic bluntness. “If you are not satisfied with your life, it is time to invent a new one.”
She never formally returned to the industry. After selling Villa La Fiorentina for approximately $60 million and eventually selling the Terraces on Mustique, she lived for years on her yacht, often docked in Cannes.
In 2008, she co-founded Wowowow, a website created and written by women for women, launched on International Women’s Day.
In 2020, she received the Lion of St. Mark, the Cannes Lions Festival’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. She was the first woman to receive it since the award’s institution in 2011.
The awards accumulated across her career constitute the most comprehensive collection of industry recognition ever assembled by a single executive. She was named one of the top 10 newsmakers of the 1960s by Advertising Age. She was inducted as the youngest member of the Copywriters Hall of Fame in 1969.
She was appointed by President Gerald Ford to represent business at the Economic Summit and by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans.
The claim that Wells Lawrence was the inspiration for Mad Men’s Peggy Olson is widely repeated but involves nuance. Creator Matthew Weiner also cited Helen Gurley Brown as a partial inspiration. Wells Lawrence was never a secretary. She was always a copywriter from her first job.
The more accurate framing is that Wells Lawrence was the Mad Men era, the real version of what the show dramatized. She is briefly alluded to in the show itself in a scene where Roger Sterling references her as leverage in an argument.
Mary Wells Lawrence died in London on May 11, 2024, two weeks short of her 96th birthday. She had moved to London from Cannes in 2020. At the time of her death, she was working on a follow-up to A Big Life in Advertising.
The obituaries that followed acknowledged what the industry had spent two decades forgetting. That the woman who had just died in London at 95 had been, during the years when American advertising was at the peak of its cultural influence, the single most important person in the building.
“Of course I am a legend,” she had said. “But it is not because of any great gift I have. It is because I am a risk-taker.”
The campaigns she created are still embedded in American culture. The I heart NY logo is reproduced on millions of souvenirs sold in New York every year. The “plop plop fizz fizz” jingle is recognized by Americans who were not born when it aired.
She built an agency that billed $885 million a year, sold it for $160 million, lived in a villa where Grace Kelly attended her parties, and died in London at 95 working on a book.
She was not simply the woman the Mad Men era was based on. She was more powerful, more successful, and more creative than any character in that show, male or female.
She did not disappear so much as she departed deliberately and on her own terms from an industry she felt had stopped deserving her.