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At Procter & Gamble it wasn't a man who was
the leader, it was a philosophy, and that was so powerful
it transformed the people who worked there, turning a lot
of individuals into one mind and one voice.
In 1968, when we went to work for P&G, it set
the standard in the package-goods world for controlled, scientific
marketing-religious consumer research, self discipline, relentless
will and staying power. The mystique of Procter & Gamble was
so dynamic that each executive was viewed as an atomic part
of a huge omniscient power by the outside world. Procter's
executives, once they had trained there, were in such demand
they could move to almost any other company and increase their
fortunes.
Advertising agencies who worked for Procter
were viewed as sophisticates who could be counted on to work
scientifically and maturely. However, like the Catholic Church,
the company kept a pragmatic eye out for small miracles beyond
their control and invested, warmly but warily, in one or two
of the most intuitive, spontaneous agencies.
It was the press touting our success with troubled
brands that caught their eye. One of Procter's laws was that
a product had too much invested in it to be allowed to die
and if it was given the right branding idea and the right
advertising it never would. So an exorbitant amount of time
and expense was invested to bring back the dead and to give
rebirth to brands that began to droop. Procter's Crest toothpaste
with fluoride to fight cavities had received the ADA claim
and was winning the sweepstakes. Procter's other toothpaste,
Gleem, had once enjoyed a 45 percent share of the toothpaste
market. After Crest appeared with fluoride, Gleem steadily
lost share of market and was becoming an emergency. Ed Harness,
who was soon to become chairman, liked the idea of trying
a hot creative agency for Gleem. Ed Lotspeich, the corporate
advertising manager, was sent to take a look at Wells Rich
Greene to see how far-out we might be. He looked us over with
a dry eye, but we passed his test and were duly invited to
Cincinnati to meet the toothpaste executives at the Queens
City Club, where for years agencies were hired and fired,
encouraged or warned, while breakfast or lunch was served
by sweet little ladies in crisp green uniforms with lace caps.
I had no idea of what we were taking on when we went to work
for Procter & Gamble-it was so different from any account
I had ever wrapped myself around, it was so structured and
so sure of its infallibility. It would take me and most of
Wells Rich Greene years to enjoy their ways, and Procter would
worry and shake its head about us until we did.
We hired Al Wolfe to manage the account because
he had strong package-goods experience and when I met him
I thought he was smart and sensitive enough to loosen up and
swing with us. He had a hard time. He did learn to appreciate
the flamboyant creativity but I think he despaired of us getting
into Procter's formulaic groove. "The Blonde," he called me:
"The Blonde" think this, " The Blonde" said that. I imagine
this cheeky expression gave him some distance from the emotions
he felt working for a woman-in person, he was unfailingly
polite to me. I couldn't have cared less what monikers Al
or anyone else at the agency found therapeutic, I was aware
of the difficulties some of the men had working for me. There
were no other women creating agencies as I was with large,
big-time, big-budget accounts. Women-in-business was just
becoming a big issue. A few talented men resigned from the
agency because they found the idea of working for a woman
intolerable. Herb Fisher, whom I admired and had big plans
for, confronted me in the middle of a busy hallway on a difficult
day when I was wishing I had been born with ten heads. "Mary,
I've made up my mind about something and the sooner I tell
you the better. I can't do this. I can't work for a woman.
I don't think you can handle all this. I have to run this
agency-or I have to leave." And so, of course, he left.
Marty Stern, our marketing director, was ecstatic
when we got the Gleem account. Dick Rich was not. He liked
to feel like a star with clients and Procter's controlling
science made him crazy. When his first campaign for Gleem
was not received well at P&G, he reacted with a New York shrug
and disinterest and I found myself in Charlie Moss's office
with yet another opportunity for him and Stan.
Charlie was working 25-hour days at the time
but he and Stan began staying even later, had burgers and
fries sent up every midnight, and finally came up with a taste
strategy for Gleem that I liked a lot. Crest, the competition,
had fluoride, a real ingredient in an era when toothpastes
contained ghost ingredients that worked more on your mind
than on your teeth. Fortunately, from Wells Rich Greene's
point of view, fluoride toothpaste did not taste good at first
and a lot of kids didn't want to brush their teeth with it.
Charlie and Stan's idea was to exaggerate the delicious taste
of Gleem, a toothpaste without fluoride, in television commercials
where mothers chased their sons and daughters up and down
and around the house, caught them, made them brush their teeth
with Gleem, whereupon the kids discovered they loved the taste
of Gleem and brushed their teeth happily ever after. The point
was that it is better to have your kids brushing their teeth
with a toothpaste they like than to have them refuse to brush
their teeth at all with a fluoride toothpaste. Charlie's "Best
Tasting Toothpaste in the World" campaign was a hit at Procter
and it was a hit with television viewers, too-even by Procter's
standards the commercials got extremely high recall scores-and
it was a hit with mothers and kids. We firmly held our own
against Crest.
A few years, however, Procter decided that they
should put fluoride into Gleem. There went the good-taste
strategy that was saving Gleem's business! Gleem began to
taste like any other fluoride toothpaste, and we were back
to square one. By that time Procter had assigned us Safeguard
soap, Prell shampoo, Sure deodorant and a long line of other
products and we found ourselves having a love affair with
a client who cherished us for challenging them with big ideas
and arresting advertising but who constantly reproached us,
in an ideological struggle filled with long sermons, for not
really getting their act.
We agreed with the basic underpinnings of Procter's
creed but they had created a painfully slow, Byzantine organization
with layers of management that had to be convinced not only
that advertising was on-strategy but that each nuance was
Procter correct. Procter believed that these different levels
of control kept intuition and creativity on the right track.
Unfortunately, the executives at different levels had different
levels of experience and ability. The agency was expected
to escort its creativity at the top, using all the persuasion
it could muster. It was also expected to help train Procter's
young executives along the way, those who, in their early
years, were inexperienced so, naturally, were opinionated.
When the agency finally reached the powerful
guys on the top floors-the Bob Whelings, Bob Goldsteins, Steve
Donovans, Sandy Weiners, Bill Connells, John Smales, John
Peppers, Tom Lacos and Bob Blanchards-Procter & Gamble marketing
became individual and courageous and tried to resurrect any
magic lost along the way. These names may not mean as much
to you as Sting, Mick, Bono or Bowie, but that only means
you don't know the package-goods business. They are package-goods
stars. And good guys, the kind you want for blood buddies
or husbands and fathers of your children.
I spent a lot of time with those good guys and
I wondered why I never met a wife. So I organized a lunch
for wives only and I invited Mrs. Ed Harness, who was then
the wife of the chairman. It seemed a perfectly natural thing
to do as a female head of one of their agencies, although
no one had done such a thing before, so my lunch was viewed
nervously in Cincinnati. We were a little itchy together at
first but we all quickly dropped our hair, the way women do,
and had a great time. I made friends I cherish, like Nancy
Donovan, a bright light of a businesswoman. But best of all
was what I learned in the long discussions the group of us
had, taking us late into the dinner hour-candid information
I would never have learned any other way-women are so communicative.
I have never revealed one precious word from that charming
lunch and I certainly won't now
The most tedious P&G meetings were inside Wells
Rich Greene-boring struggles when our Procter & Gamble account
representatives tried to control our feisty creatives. Al
Wolfe felt trapped between P&G's system and what he saw as
Charlie Moss's arrogant dismissal of an expression Charlie
loathes. They were the less talented people who bought the
agency time for the superachievers to get around to producing
the right stuff. They were enablers, and everyone who has
ever run an agency has enablers to fill up time until a superior
talent is free. No matter how hard we searched, no matter
how much money we paid-and we paid extraordinary salaries-we
were never uniformly talented. No agency is. There isn't enough
talent in the business. The knowing use of enablers, who are
not talented enough but are sweetly willing, is one of the
darker sides of creative business.
Looking back, as though from the window of a
rocket, I see Procter & Gamble as a space station in its own
galaxy, a world all its own, filled with converts who had
been screened for uninhibited, exhibitionist, mercurial traits
or anything that might pollute the environment. Life in the
space station was civilized-sensible, rational, smart enough
to be interesting and full of good guys who generally agreed
with one another. Life was in control. If you had a problem,
you could take it to the high priests of research-their reports
were viewed as safe and sure guides to success.
The way I'm telling it you'd think each account
was a distinct experience and that we focused on each of them
one at a time. But that's not how it was. They all happened
at the same time in an explosion. Jack Landry and Ron Chapin
rode up to our offices in the same elevator on the same day
and when they got out on our floor, Charlie Tillinghast, Gordon
Sherman and Peter Godfrey got in and went down.
Here is the rhythm of the gentle chaos in a
typical 48-hour period of my advertising days, which could
be technically demanding, terribly dull and inconsequential;
the world didn't always tilt. Still-48 advertising hours could
be amazing, with arialike moments and without farce.
I got off the plane from Detroit after that
first press conference we had at American Motors and dashed
to Grand Central Station, where we were hanging a spectacular,
three-dimensional ad for Boodles gin over the main waiting
room. A gin martini was the only drink I ever learned to like
other than wine and I felt strongly about what gin should
be, so when we got the Boodles business I did a test run comparing
it to the gins I knew and loved and discovered that Boodles
was better. Drier. Harding put it on all Braniff flights and
I talked it up all over town. I explained to Charlie, who
didn't know gin, that Boodles was great because it made a
martini without flowers-you know, that slightly floral aftertaste
you can get with gin. Charlie blew that visual picture up
into a vast red mouth with flowers coming out of it and gave
it the words " Martinis Without Flowers" and hung it high
at Grand Central Station. I wanted to see it before heading
back to the office, where I was due to see ideas for new snacks
I was going to present the next morning to General Mills in
Minneapolis. When I walked into Grand Central I was pleased
to see there were crowds standing under the big red mouth
with flowers, everybody seemed to be nodding their heads in
understanding. So I rushed on to the agency.
The snack people were getting impatient and
rambunctious outside my office and Kathie was giving me her
infuriated look, but Jack Landry had come up from Phillip
Morris and was waiting to see me. "Come on, Little Tiger,
come have a drink with me. We have to talk." Jack and I liked
each other, trusted each other, we had become each other's
security blankets in the political wear and tear at Phillip
Morris. I thought his marketing abilities at Phillip Morris
were extraordinary. He never got enough credit for that company's
success. He was a late-day drinker, though, and I always tried
to meet with him in the morning. The Leo Burnett Marlboro
men handled their late-day bat meetings with Jack with gusto
and style, but I couldn't do that (a distinct advantage in
being a woman).
I followed him out of the office that evening
because I knew what he wanted to talk about. Benson & Hedges
sales had soared to record heights on the strength of our
television commercials. But the TV ban on cigarette advertising
had forced us to take our campaign off television and into
print, and Dick didn't have the same gift for print he had
for television. Herb Green and George D'Amato, who had come
with us when we left Jack Tinker, had tried to adapt the campaign
into print but a lot was lost in the translation. At the bar,
downstairs, Jack said he had to level with me, he didn't believe
the Benson & Hedges television campaign was ever going to
make it in print. "It's a television idea, Mary," he said,
"you can't make a silk purse out of it." What to do? We talked
for an hour or so, I tried to change his mind and he was sympathetic,
but I left with palpitations, promising to get back to him
within the week. It was getting dark, I had a few thousand
other things to do besides save the Benson & Hedges account,
I had to sample and select snacks to take to Minneapolis,
name them (Monkeys, Rabbits and Squirrels, maybe?) and write
the speech I was due to give shortly. (I was forever giving
speeches. When clients asked me to give them I couldn't say
no and as I was the advertising flavor of the day, I was invited
to speak to advertising and sales executive clubs all over
America. We were trying to build awareness of the agency in
all areas of the country so it also seemed smart to accept
invitations to speak to Rotary groups and newspaper associations
and bank conferences, even a meatpackers' convention. I spent
one entire flight home to Dallas studying America's meatpackers'
problems, but I came down on the side of the cows and that
just added to my worries. The problem was that I couldn't
give speeches that were written for me myself to bring out
Mary Wells the Actress, so I was always writing them in snatches
on napkins, notepads, Kleenex, anything available anywhere.)
When I got to the agency I saw Stan Dragoti
about to leave for the night and I was struck by a monumental
hunch. I grabbed him and told him about Jack's fears about
Benson & Hedges and said I thought that he, Stan, was the
one who could reassure Jack that we could keep the brand growing
in print. "I don't even know Jack. Why am I the magic messenger?
How could I know what to say to convince him?" Stan protested.
I insisted that Jack would appreciate his great, prize-winning
reputation in print, and anyway, I just knew he was Jack's
kind of guy, he could give Jack a little more faith and buy
us the time we needed. Shaking his head, Stan hurried over
to the bar, introduced himself to Jack, and found a way to
reassure him that if he gave us time we would find the answer
to the Benson & Hedges print campaign. I don't know where
that hunch came from, the agency business is so fast moving
and so full of emergencies, you learn when to jump without
looking and when to fly without wings.
The next morning, while I was in Minneapolis
presenting snack ideas to General Mills, Bob Adler, who ran
the Bic business, called the agency and gave us their felt-tip
pen to advertise. We named it the Bic Banana and Mel Brooks
became the voice-over for the commercials. "Some tree!" Mel
said, walking by our grand spiraling wood stairway in the
entrance hall on his way to meet Bob Adler.
Bob Adler was a master at promoting disposable,
impulse pens and lighters and razors. His idea was to put
all his money behind one Bic product, sensationalize it, and
it would then sell all the other products. He chose the right
agency. " Flick your Bic" was Charlie's line. He had to force
it down the throats of his creative team, Adam Hanft and Maurice
Mahler, but once they gave in and accepted it, they were otherworldly
wonderful. Their commercials put Gillette's Cricket lighter,
the established one, out of business for a time. Lew Wechsler,
our head of TV programming, flooded Hollywood with the lighters
and we got about 100 prime-time jokes from stars like Bob
Hope using the line "Flick your Bic." We thought of it as
free advertising.
It gets a lot worse than cold in Minneapolis.
When I got up the morning of my snack meetings it was so far
below zero the radio reported people were freezing to death
on their way from their homes to their cars. My motel room
was not connected under cover to the lobby and I faced a life-threatening
walk to the taxi that would take me to General Mills. I called
the agency to see if anyone had found a way to solve Jack
Benson's & Hedges print problem, but no one had. No one had
by the time I reached Wells Rich Greene, either, that afternoon.
Charlie and Stan were meeting with a group from American Motors,
so I looked around the buzzing agency and I couldn't find
anybody who was rethinking the Benson & Hedges print. I would
have had a tantrum, but I knew Charlie. So instead, at about
seven p.m. I went out and sat very quietly in the chair outside
my office and stopped breathing. In a few minutes Charlie
and Stan came shuffling down the hall on their way home. They
had to pass me and by that time I was grey from not breathing.
They stopped to say goodnight, looked at me, took a few more
steps. Then Charlie said, "We can't go." Stan: "Why? What's
wrong?" Charlie: "She'll get sick. She's so depressed about
Benson & Hedges. She's all alone, she won't go home, she'll
stay all night like that. We can't go. We've gotta find an
answer." They returned to their offices. I went into mine,
ordered up pizzas and wrote my speech. About midnight they
were back and they had a line, "America's favorite cigarette
break," and ideas for breaking cigarettes that finally made
the television work in print and we all went home.
Waiting for Charlie and Stan, I had telephoned
Dorothy Carter, the smart doctor who was a consultant at Miles
Laboratories. I'd thought of her on the plane from Minneapolis
because I'd seen an Alka-Seltzer commercial the night before
at the motel. It was very funny commercial about spicy meatballs
that was getting raves in the agency world and would win many
awards. But I knew that Walter Compton would be unhappy with
it. He didn't want humor to be so extreme it was all you remembered
about an Alka-Seltzer commercial. Then Dorothy Carter jumped
into my mind. She was happy to hear from me. She said that
Alka-Seltzer sales had been off, Walter Compton had left Tinker
and gone to Doyle Dane Bernbach looking for another sales
turn around, but he wasn't happy, he was always telling her
that I was the only one who understood Alka-Seltzer the way
he did. "Perhaps," she said, "you and I should meet and have
a talk about Alka-Seltzer's future?" I made a date. I was
pleased with myself; I went to bed and dreamt of hurdles.
Life has its hallucinatory moments, or certainly
mine has, but in the sixties and early seventies you had to
work a little harder to stay focused, so many large questions
had been let loose-protest, authority, war, death, civil rights,
women's rights, freedom, individuality. They weren't new questions
but they were being presented so regularly on television you
couldn't look away as you might have before. 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. So in my head Alka-Seltzer,
long cigarettes and making Midas a household word were bumping
up against Vietnam, the Kennedy assassinations, Martin Luther
King and Neil Armstrong padding around in moon dust-not to
mention Andy Warhol, Alice Cooper and what had become of Abbie
Hoffman. And I had added the quagmire of taking Wells Rich
Greene public.
We took the stock over the counter on Halloween,
1968, not long after we'd gotten the TWA account and in the
glow of the publicity we'd received for the American Motors
campaign and the success of Benson & Hedges. We believed that
stock options would give us a gold stick to throw out in front
of talents we would want to hire as well as help us hang on
to the valuable talent we already had. We innocently thought
that the leverage in options would make Wells Rich Greene
tighten up expenses and exercise restraints. We thought our
people would mature. Well, that never happened. Paul Hallingby
of White Weld & Co. had been suggested to me as an investment
banker by Harding's banker, Gus Levy, at Goldman Sachs and
he led us through the offering. Our IPO had a business plan
behind it but no real track record, just like the IPOs of
the nineties. The stock opened at $17 a share. Dick and Stew
and I each sold shares worth a little more than $1,200,000.
Then we sailed into stockholders' meetings, board of directors'
meetings and meetings with investment bankers in all the big
cities.
I invited Harding's lawyer, Arnold Grant, to
be a member of Wells Rich Greene's board. He said, "You know,
Leland Hayward is a client of mine and I bet he'd get a kick
out of being on an advertising agency board. He'd certainly
get the gist of it. Why don't you take him to lunch and talk
to him about it?" So I took Leland to the Colony Club and
proposed to him and he was tickled pink to become a board
member. Troy Post, still the head of GreatAmerica, and Emilio
Pucci were also happy to join the board. It was a merry group;
the outside directors were fond of us and very helpful. The
disciplines and long-term planning and financial reporting
that accompanied public ownership and the time that took out
of my overpromised life might have sunk me but for their help
and, more important, Harding's. Harding was always a beam
of clear vision to help me machete my way through the jungles
in each year's financial plans and results.
To make the stock easier to buy, we planned
to move it from over the counter to the American Stock Exchange;
Paul Hallingby had completed the plans and wanted to meet
the next morning. We met so early that the cleaning lady hadn't
reached my office yet and that pizza Charlie and Stan and
I'd had the night before was still hanging around. Paul wrinkled
his nose and left as soon as he could. I was speaking at the
New York Sales Executive lunch that day and needed to shine
my speech. Bill Claggett, a major executive at Ralston Purina,
would be sitting next to me and I wanted to impress him and
persuade him to give us some of his dog-foos business. Also
on my Do It Immediately list was my speech for the coming
TWA road show, the presentation I had to make in Detroit to
sell American Motors on a nervy idea we had for the next campaign,
the speech I would need in a couple of weeks when I would
be inducted into the Copywriters Hall of Fame, a speech to
the American Marketing Association in Atlanta-part of the
deal I'd made with Bill Durkee when he gave us the RC Cola
and Diet Rite business- and an emergency trip to California
I had to make, preferably yesterday, to untangle a knot in
our relationship with Al Crossin, a smart, highly expectant
executive at Hunt-Wesson.
Add the potential disasters that hovered like
spooks in our dark corners, for example: the fact that I did
not like, in fact I did not even understand, the work we had
done so far on RC Cola and I had promised Bill Durkee that
our campaign would put RC Cola right up there with Coke and
Pepsi. Add my belief that the group handling Love Cosmetics
was falling apart. Love had grown into an extended line of
products that required us to advertise more heavily in print
ads. They were being written by a choir of ladies, an odd
group, some of them older, Revlon Fire & Ice types and some
of them kohl-eyed, go-go Mary Quant types, one of whom put
a hex on Charlie and his children when we fired her, making
Charlie unbearable for a couple of weeks. It was not easy
to find great fashion advertising writers. But Peter Godfrey
was becoming as uneasy about the ladies as I was, so somewhere
in the world we had to find replacements soon or that account
would fall into the arms of another agency that was wooing
Peter Godfrey, just waiting for us to fail.
Add to that the surprises-like the call I got
from Don Swanson and Bruce Atwater saying they had decided
to hurry up the launch of the new snacks I'd presented to
them in Minneapolis so we needed advertising for them immediately,
how soon could I return to Minneapolis? And, finally, add
the unexpected blows like Charlie and Stan's announcement,
mid-pizza, that they had to have a vacation or die. They'd
rented a house in St. Tropez for three weeks, where they were
going to go come hell or high water to write a movie. In the
late sixties and the seventies everybody on Madison Avenue
wanted to make movies and few were actually making them.
These days there are smart ways to deal with
stress. In those days and many years I dealt with it by dancing.
When I got to my apartment nights I turned on Sly Stone and
"I Want to Take You Higher" and I hoofed, I strutted and pranced
and boogied and stomped and shimmied and sometimes I slipped
in a hula or a tango. Later I shook my booty with the Sunshine
Band. I shook until I could get out of my head and into the
tub. Then I would sit in the water, a zombie. People in the
building averted their eyes when we shared an elevator. God
knows what they thought. The best song I ever found for shaking
my psyche into shape was "I Will Survive." It's still better
than any pill.
Harding and I made a pact we would talk to each
other every night no matter how late before we went to sleep.
I called the kids earlier, when they got home from school,
but Harding and I talked late into every night, wherever he
was in the world, calming each other, loving each other, promising
each other anything.
By 1971 I knew these things: that there were
few people who could build a hot advertising agency, and I
would not be able to hire one of them to help me build mine
because he would be building one of his own-and that in the
real world there was no one who would be a better creative
director for Wells Rich Greene than Charlie Moss-and that
if I lost Charlie Moss to the movie business I was stupid.
From the book A BIG LIFE (IN ADVERTISING) by
Mary Wells Lawrence
Copyright (c) 2002 by Mary L. Book Corp.
Reprinted with the permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Mary Wells Lawrence, Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 2002 by Mary L. Book Corp.. All rights reserved.
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