Book Notes: A Big Life In Advertising
05.12.24 - I saw the news today that advertising pioneer Mary Wells Lawrence had passed away at the age of 95. I remembered reading her book, “A Big Life In Advertising” and wanted to provide a brief recap below.
If you’re not familiar with the ground-breaking work of Ms. Wells Lawrence, she was the first woman president of an advertising agency, and the first woman CEO of a company on the New York Stock Exchange. Just a few of her famous campaigns included:
Alka Seltzer - “Plop plop, fizz fizz”
New York - “I ♥ NY”
Midas - “Trust the Midas Touch”
Ford - “At Ford, Quality is Job 1”
Sure - “Raise Your Hand If You're Sure”
She released her book, A Big Life In Advertising, in 2003 and below are my notes from it:
Advertising Business
Learn to focus, life will be a lot easier
That is the issue that defines who will lead an organization. You can be extremely gifted in a specific way but not be talented at accepting responsibility for the whole, for keeping everybody safe and blooming.
If you are not obsessive in the advertising business you will always work for someone else.
We never fell into the trap of believing in our fortunes couldn't change, though; we ran scared a lot of the time, we used to describe those days as living in a tank full of jellyfish, we kept expecting the sting. It was too good to be true, too good to last.
You could tell when a company had a great leader and guide; you could sense his presence in the halls, and the heart of him was evident in every development at the place.
There is a traditional occupational hazard in the advertising business. Writer's block, art director's block, idea block, shyness between the writer and the art director, inferiority complex, depression - it can happen to any creative team when the stakes are so high.
The same brilliance, the same guts you use to grab the brass ring and lead that client to a success will be perceived as arrogance and an irritation as soon as the client is successful. You have to stay close and take your agency through a transition from leading the client to taking more and more direction from him. – Bill Bernbach
There are few people who can build a hot advertising agency, I would not be able to hire one of them to help build mine because he would be building one of his own.
Awareness is at the very core of the advertising business, you have to be aware of what is happening today, now, this minute, to be connected, to be effective, not only about the issues but also about style, trends, art.
There is an ethic in superhot creative advertising agencies that says you are permitted to work yourself to death and never leave the agency, like some mad mole, so long as you don't appear to be happy about it and do your share of moaning and groaning, the agency anthem.
The advertising business is about good fortune, good and bad luck. It's about timing, who happens to come along at a particular moment. It is about talent. It is about relationships inside the advertising agency and relationships with clients.
I loved the advertising business because everybody in it was always learning something, we learned in order to get clients and we learned in order to keep clients and we learned so that we would be ready for anything. We had to be totally alive, alert to everything everywhere, so that our marketing ideas and our advertising and our style were empathetic with consumers every second of every day. The slightest sloth, the slightest complacency and our empathy soured and we fell from grace. We knew that consciously but we also knew it in our bones and in our memories and in our spirits.
Campaigns
"The end of the plain plane. We don't get you there any faster. It just seems that way."
Rolling Stone appeared about the same time we did and we sent issues along with hot albums to clients who, even if uncool, relished the thought.
The idea of the campaign was "RC Cola Cools Off the Hot Cities." Translated, that means that RC was creating the smart scene, it was the catalyst that turned the city into the hip place to be. This theme allowed us to limit our spending to the cities that offered RC Cola the most potential and to compliment those cities, to make the people there feel hip and to make them think about RC Cola, probably for the first time.
Advertising Strategy
The key is to look at a product in its metamorphosis. To see the advantage in a disadvantage and could turn things around.
"My rule is that first you must have inspiration, then you experiment with it, but if you succeed you must never imitate yourself. It is OK to experiment, OK to fail, nobody has a 1000 batting average, but when you succeed, move on, do not waste a second of your life imitating your own successes!" Dr. Edwin Land
Great advertising, the kind that works, almost always comes out of the product you are going to advertise or the product's world. You need to have an open mind, the nosiness of a detective, and to assimilate all the information you can get from every imaginable source when you start to create advertising. It is knowledge that stimulates great advertising ideas and your own intuition. If you find that the product is factually superior to its competitors in any important way, you are in clover.
There is nothing better than a fact if you have a great one. If, on the other hand, your product appears to be inferior to its competitors, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but don't be naïve; it is always possible that the competitors' advantage is really just a way of looking at the product, a dream that some other advertising wizard had and presented in advertising so good it has been accepted as a vital truth. You yourself have to know before you can spin. You have to gather up information, positive and negative, take it apart and analyze it coolly, shrewdly and with imagination. Unique products and clear cases of superiority don't come along every five minutes - a lot of products are similar to other products - so with knowledge to guide you, that is the moment that your imagination kicks in and you become a storyteller. Advertising, in any form, is about telling stories that captivate readers or viewers and persuade them to buy products.
Committees can develop a campaign about a thing like the Marlboro cowboy, you can fine-tune cowboys for years by paying close attention to the photographs and the use of type. But committees have trouble creating a new style, because the essence of styles is an intuition that is perpetually changing. Committees are ponderous, and it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. By the time a committee would get around to creating a new style it would seem prehistoric.
For more information on Ms. Wells Lawrence:
05.11.24 - Mary Wells Lawrence, High-Profile Advertising Pioneer, Dies at 95
09.04.13 - Real-Life Peggy Olson? The First Woman to Rule in Madison Avenue’s Advertising World
