Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Mad Women

Episode Date: November 12, 2022

This week, we look at the Great Women of Advertising. The Hall Of Famers who broke the rules, kicked open the doors and created some of the most famous advertising of our times. We’ll meet the first... advertising woman ever, the woman who created the first images of wives as Happy Homemakers, the woman who revolutionized the retail business, the female creative director who inspired the “I Love New York” campaign, as well as some of the top ad women of today. Move over Mad Men, it’s time to honour the Mad Women. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,
Starting point is 00:00:46 who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.
Starting point is 00:01:14 Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. Due to popular demand, we've dug very, very deep into our archives and are pleased to announce the re-release of episodes from the last season of The Age of Persuasion. And we've remastered them to fit our Under the Influence format. Here is an episode from 2011. This is an apostrophe podcast production. You're so king in it. Scores of it in an instant.
Starting point is 00:02:03 Your teeth look whiter than noon, noon, noon You're not you when you're hungry You're a good hand with all things You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. Damn, barred-ass, Marcus Donaldson. I'm telling you, he's jumped us. I mean, gloves off, stick down, no warning. He challenged the Chiefs.
Starting point is 00:02:40 Call his name. Call his name! The movie was Slapshot. Only someone who has lived the life of a minor hockey league player could have written that movie. Someone who has lived in those dressing rooms, knew how to handle the profane locker room talk, fought those battles, and had the scars to prove it.
Starting point is 00:03:01 But not so. Slapshot was written by a woman. Her name was Nancy Dowd. Nancy Dowd had written the screenplay for the film North Dallas 40 and would win an Oscar for her screenplay for Coming Home in 1979. Her brother Ned Dowd was a hockey player and was grinding out a career on a minor league team called the Johnstown Jets when Nancy decided to write a screenplay about it. As a matter of fact, Ned Dowd is in Slapshot
Starting point is 00:03:38 and actually plays the goon Ogie Oglethorpe. The fact that Slapshot is written by a woman surprises many who never look closely at the credits. Back in 1977, when Slapshot came out, Dowd told the New York Times that the world had a weird view of women. She said people believe women can only write about divorce or children, the so-called women's topics. Slapshot hip-checked that perception.
Starting point is 00:04:11 Paul Newman said Slapshot was the most fun he ever had making a movie and called his character Reg Dunlop one of his favorite roles. One of Dowd's most famous Slapshot creations were the hilarious and violent Hanson Brothers, based on three brothers who actually played with Dowd's brother Ned
Starting point is 00:04:31 and the Johnstown Jets. Many of the most hilarious moments in the movie were inspired by real events. The scene where the Hanson Brothers attacked the other team during the warm-ups actually happened
Starting point is 00:04:44 with the Johnstown Jets. As did the scene where the Hanson Brothers attacked the other team during the warm-ups, actually happened with the Johnstown Jets. As did the scene where the Hanson brothers jump into the stands with their skates on to fight the crowd. One critic called Slapshot violent, bloody, and thoroughly revolting. Another said it was the bawdiest, obscenity-sprinkled movie ever made. But Newsweek called it
Starting point is 00:05:05 tough, smart, cynical, and sentimental. I'm with Newsweek. Slapshot is a tough, smart, cynical, and sentimental movie about hockey that just happened to have been written by a woman. It's the same in the world of marketing. For decades, it has been a male-dominated industry, yet many landmark advertising campaigns have been created by women. As a matter of fact, ad women have not only created many legendary campaigns over the years, they have made a huge contribution to advertising history.
Starting point is 00:05:51 These great ad women, or should I call them mad women, elbowed their way into a boys' club, broke new ground, and left behind an incredible body of work. You're under the influence. The world of advertising is a very dynamic, fast-paced industry that demands a certain type of personality. It's a business of unrelenting pressure, punishing deadlines, creativity mixed with compromise, 60-hour work weeks and mountains of rejection. And it all hinges on delicate relationships with clients. While many have an impression that those relationships are lubricated with testosterone-fueled lunches and games of golf, it may surprise you to learn that ad women have played a long and critical role in the history of advertising.
Starting point is 00:06:58 As a matter of fact, it didn't take the advertising industry very long to figure out that the main consumer for almost all products was women. According to the excellent book Ad Women by Julianne Savolka, which I highly recommend, advertisers recognized as early as the 1870s that women bought beauty products and most of the mass-produced food, clothing, and household goods. And what she didn't buy, she heavily influenced through husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. In 1870, a woman named Mathilde C. Weil and her husband moved from Germany to New York.
Starting point is 00:07:47 Not long after arriving, her husband died, leaving her suddenly alone and having to find a job to survive. She became friends with the advertising manager for Soza Don't Toothpaste and began working for the company. Her first assignment was to contact a New York newspaper about placing some Soza Don't advertising. While the newspaper happily took the booking, Mathilde, who really knew nothing of the advertising business, asked the innocent question, how will you recompense me for the same?
Starting point is 00:08:22 In other words, she was asking the newspaper for a commission for bringing them the toothpaste business. The subsequent answer and payment changed her life completely and altered advertising history by pioneering the commission system. Using her savvy, Mathilde C. Weil became the first known ad woman in North America. Not long after, she started the M.C. Weil Agency and began buying and selling media space for many advertisers. She had a knack for knowing which periodicals women liked to read,
Starting point is 00:09:02 and before long, the MC Weil agency was a vibrant, profitable advertising company. She worked until her death in 1903, was the first woman to hang out a shingle in the ad business, and she left behind a considerable estate. About that same time, another advertising agency was emerging. In 1916, an enterprising gentleman named Stanley B. Reeser bought the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency
Starting point is 00:09:40 from a very successful but aging James Walter Thompson for $500,000. In his travels, Reeser had met a very creative ad writer named Helen Lansdowne. He hired her at J. Walter Thompson, or JWT as it's known, and married her the next year. While Stanley Reeser was the managing genius behind JWT, it was his wife Helen who was its creative genius. Together, they would build JWT from 100 people to a worldwide staff of over 7,000 in 23 countries. As most of the goods sold at retail are to women, wrote James F. Gibson in 1889, it follows that women should know what to say to women in ads.
Starting point is 00:10:34 That notion was not lost on Stanley and Helen Reeser. Both believed that the growth of advertising relied on female consumers. To position JWT as a specialist in advertising to women, Helen developed the Women's Editorial Department and staffed it entirely with female creative people. By 1918, that department controlled most of the agency's prestigious soap, food, drug, and toiletry accounts, overseeing 75% of the company's entire billings. It was the biggest creative department of its kind.
Starting point is 00:11:12 As a result, Helen Reeser became the first woman to write and plan national advertising campaigns. One of her most famous advertisements was for Woodbury's facial soap in 1917. It was a print ad that showed a man nuzzling a woman's neck with the headline, A Skin You Love to Touch. To put that headline in context, it was nothing short of scandalous for its time. It's considered a landmark ad because it was the first to use sex as a selling tool. Yes, Helen Lansdowne Reeser brought sex to advertising.
Starting point is 00:11:55 In a five-year period, sales of Woodbury soap rocketed from $515,000 a year to over $2.5 million. Sex as a selling technique would reverberate throughout advertising from that point on. Helen Reeser's all-woman creative department would go on to shape and dictate the image of the modern woman, as JWT's client list included some of the most influential female brands of its time. But even though Helen Reeser ran the biggest creative department
Starting point is 00:12:33 at the biggest advertising agency and was a stockholder that sat on the board of directors, she was still held back by her gender, as she was never granted the title of vice president. But her impact on advertising and the career she launched didn't go unnoticed or uncelebrated by the industry. She was named number 14 on the list of the top 100 advertising people of the 20th century by advertising Age magazine.
Starting point is 00:13:07 Meanwhile, across town, another remarkable woman was about to change the world of retail advertising forever. Bernice Fitzgibbon began her career as a teacher in Wisconsin in 1915. Feeling unfulfilled, she moved to Chicago and got a job with the Marshall Fields store. There, she began her retail career as a salesperson on the floor of the furniture department and was soon outselling the men. But her real love was marketing, so she moved to New York with $200 in her pocket to look for an ad-writing job or copywriting position, as it's called in the industry. Little did she know that, by 1941, she would become the highest-paid woman in advertising.
Starting point is 00:14:09 Bernice Fitzgibbon's retail experience helped her land a job at Macy's as head of all home furnishings advertising. Her first assignment was to advertise... canaries. She had no idea why canaries were listed under home furnishings. But the ad she wrote was so successful, it was the best in the store's history. Ten years later, Fitzgibbon was earning $15,000 per year, an astounding salary at the time,
Starting point is 00:14:40 and was promoted to head fashion writer. Bernice wrote ads like one intelligent person talking to another. It was revolutionary for the 1930s because the Depression had given birth to hard sell, which resonates to this day in recessions in hard economic times. But she stood out from the crowd in that era by avoiding hard-sell words like item, event, or sale. Bernice had an interesting philosophy. She felt a good ad should be like a good sermon. It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable.
Starting point is 00:15:23 In other words, a good headline should provoke a reaction. One of the best examples of this was the provocative headline she wrote for a strapless evening gown, which asked the naughty question, how do you keep it up night after night? Her ad then went on to explain how Macy's gowns practically stay up by themselves But it was still sexy stuff for the 1930s
Starting point is 00:15:50 At that time, Macy's was an up-and-coming store Its strategy was to appeal to the rich Because, as Bernice noted, on the heels of the rich pour the unrich, who are the people who spend the most money. So she coined the following line that would define Macy's for decades. It pays to be thrifty. Bernice Fitzgibbon was an original and made groundbreaking marketing decisions like shifting budgets from media to promotion,
Starting point is 00:16:26 creating fashion shows featuring the Arthur Murray dance instructors, bringing guest speakers into the store, and staging live demonstrations. All of which retailers still do to this day, but Bernice did it first. Four years later, she switched to arch-rival gimbals, doubling her salary. Between 1939 and 1945, using her instincts for attracting female shoppers, she increased gimbals revenues by an astounding 96 percent and became the highest paid woman in advertising, earning over $90,000 a year,
Starting point is 00:17:07 the equivalent of about $1.9 million in today's dollars. She coined a famous slogan for Gimbels, too, that said, Nobody but nobody undersells Gimbels. I think that's been borrowed once or twice since. She would go on to open her own ad agency in 1954, retire wealthy, and is honored at number 62 on the list of the top 100 advertising people of all time. In 1949, Bill Burnback started a legendary ad agency called Doyle Dane Burnback, or DDB as it is now known. You've heard me talk about this legendary advertising agency many times.
Starting point is 00:17:59 It revolutionized the industry. In the Mad Men era, in an industry dominated by men, the amazing Bill Burnback's first hire was a copywriter named Phyllis Robinson. She was so good, he named her Copy Chief. Robinson had been inspired by Bernice Fitzgibbon, and watching Bernice rise to the top of her profession lit a fire in Robinson. Bernbach teamed her up with legendary art director Bob Gage, and by doing so, created the first-ever copywriter-art director team. Previous to this, writers wrote ads alone and gave the script to a pool of art directors
Starting point is 00:18:43 to draw up. But Birnbeck's concept of creating writer-art director teams revolutionized advertising creative departments and is still employed to this day. Phyllis Robinson was an inspiring leader at DDB and would go on to preside over tough and talented ad men such as George Lois, Julian Koenig, and Bob Levinson. She would create landmark work for Polaroid, Clairol, Avis, and Orbox department store.
Starting point is 00:19:16 When she passed away in December of 2010, Keith Reinhart, chairman emeritus of DDB, said, When Volkswagen decided to introduce the Beetle to the U.S. market, they did not conduct an agency search. Instead, they simply said, We want the agency that does Orbox. And thus, thanks to Phyllis, the creative revolution was born. So true.
Starting point is 00:19:42 The historic VW ad work sparked the advertising that changed everything on Madison Avenue to this day. It brought wit and charm to advertising. Thanks to Phyllis Robinson. Mr. Jones and Mr. Crampler were neighbors. They each had $3,000. With his money, Mr. Jones bought himself a $3,000 car. With his money, Mr. Crampler bought himself a new refrigerator, a new range, a new washer, a new dryer, a record player, two new television sets, and a brand new Volkswagen. Now Mr. Jones is faced with that age-old problem, keeping up with the Cremplers. One of the gifted copywriters that Phyllis Robinson hired at DDB was Mary Wells. Born in Ohio, she was smart, attractive, and stylish.
Starting point is 00:21:05 And like most women of her era, she started her career writing ads for a retail store. One year later, she moved to New York, followed in Bernice Fitzgibbon's footsteps, and landed a job as fashion ad manager at Macy's. Her work turned heads, including that of Phyllis Robinson, and four years later, Robinson hired her. DDB was the mecca for ad people because it was the Beatles
Starting point is 00:21:34 of advertising, upending all the conventional thinking and creating trends, styles, and advertising that was revolutionary. Wells learned at the feet of both Bill Burnback and Phyllis Robinson. But ambition called. Seven years later, she left DDB to join ad agency Jack Tinker and Partners
Starting point is 00:21:58 because the CEO there had promised her the role of president. But when the time came to announce the promotion, he reneged, saying the world wasn't ready for a female company president, adding that giving her the title would, quote, limit the exciting growth of Tinker. So Wells quit on the spot, took two highly regarded people named Dick Rich and Stu Green with her, and started an ad agency called Wells Rich Green in 1966 and installed herself as president. Within six months, the agency was billing $28.5 million, or the equivalent of over $250 million today,
Starting point is 00:22:43 and it was one of the biggest in the U.S. Wells Rich Green would go on to create award-winning campaigns for clients like Braniff Airlines, Max Factor, and Alka-Seltzer. I can't believe I ate that whole thing. You ate it, Ralph. I can't believe I ate that whole thing. No, Ralph, I ate it. I can't believe I ate that whole thing. No, Ralph, I ate it. I can't believe I ate that whole thing.
Starting point is 00:23:09 Take two Alka-Seltzer. Alka-Seltzer neutralizes all the acid your stomach has churned out. For your upset stomach and headache, take Alka-Seltzer and feel better fast. Wells' most famous work was probably the I Love New York campaign that still runs today, 45 years later. Wells eventually took her ad agency public and became the first female CEO of a company
Starting point is 00:23:50 listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Mary Wells, now Mary Wells Lawrence, was an original, a leader, and a groundbreaker and is number 19 on the top 100 advertising people of the century. As late as the 1970s, there were almost no female account executives at advertising agencies. Account executives are the ad agency folks who handle the clients, oversee advertising strategy, and act as a bridge between the client
Starting point is 00:24:31 and the creative department. Because most clients were men, most account handlers were men, too. But back in the 1960s, a woman named Charlotte Beers was working her way up the ladder as a researcher for a brand of rice called Uncle Ben's. Then, in 1969, the tail end of the Mad Men era, she joined J. Walter Thompson Chicago and was given the job of a county executive.
Starting point is 00:24:59 Her secretary immediately demanded a transfer, telling Beers, No offense, but I want to work for a man who's going to move ahead. That would end up being a bad decision. Charlotte Beers developed a knack for landing new business and quickly rose to become the first female vice president in the firm's 106-year history, achieving what Helen Lansdowne Reeser herself could not 30 years earlier. But the top-spotted J. Walter Thompson eluded her,
Starting point is 00:25:34 so she left to become the CEO at a smaller ad agency called Tatum, Laird & Kudner. Over the next decade, she tripled the agency's billings to over $325 million. Her success didn't go unnoticed, and in 1992, she was wooed away by ad giant Ogilvy & Mather to run the $5.4 billion, 8,000-employee multinational company. Ogilvy was at a low point, having lost some of its biggest clients. But Beers knew how to win business. After all, this was a woman who had pitched the Sears account by taking apart a power drill and putting it back together again in front of the Sears clients without breaking a fingernail. Charlotte Beers cut a striking figure.
Starting point is 00:26:31 Tall and glamorous, she favored body-length scarves and Jackie O. sunglasses, which she wore indoors. She called fellow CEOs Honey and Darling and embraced her femininity. But she could also command a boardroom. When Ogilvy was pitching the Jaguar account, she swept into the room, threw her Jaguar keys down on the table with a crash and said, That's what it's all about, gentlemen. The prestige of owning a Jag and what it says about you. She won the account. She helped her agency win the $500 million IBM business,
Starting point is 00:27:07 called, at the time, the largest win in advertising history. Fortune magazine put Beers on the cover, naming her one of the most powerful women in America. By the time Charlotte Beers stepped down at Ogilvy, the agency's billings had increased by $2 billion. She had orchestrated one of the biggest turnarounds in recent advertising agency history, and for that and more, she sits at number 49 on the top 100 advertising people of the century list. Linda Kaplan Thaler loved music. So she began giving music lessons.
Starting point is 00:27:54 One of her clients owned an advertising agency and asked her to write some jingles, which in turn helped her get a job as a junior ad writer at none other than J. Walter Thompson. She stayed there for 17 years, where she wrote the famous jingle for Toys R Us, which still runs to this day. I don't want to grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid
Starting point is 00:28:15 They got a million toys in Toys R Us that I can play with I don't want to grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid They got the best for so much less So really click your lips from bikes to trains to video games. Kaplan Thaler then left JWT to take the top creative post at none other than Wells Rich Green. Three years later, she helped land the Herbal Essence account, then took that account with her in 1997 to start her own advertising agency called the Kaplan-Thaler Group. A big part of that agency's unique appeal was the fact it was run by women.
Starting point is 00:28:54 As Kaplan-Thaler noted, there's enough estrogen around our offices to make Arnold Schwarzenegger ovulate. Of Kaplan-Thaler's many well-known campaigns, no doubt the most famous is for Aflac Insurance. The supplemental insurance company with the strange name needed awareness. One day, an art director from Kaplan Thaler's team was walking around New York's Central Park at lunchtime, repeating the word Aflac, trying to come up with an advertising idea. He passed some ducks near a pond and realized that Aflac sounded like a duck quack. So Kaplan Thaler's agency pitched a campaign based around
Starting point is 00:29:39 a quacking duck. It was a risky idea for a state insurance company, but Kaplan Thaler, all 5 feet 4 inches of her, is a force of nature in the boardroom. She convinced Affleck to go with the duck. Here's the first TV commercial Affleck ever did, where two men sit on a park bench, trying to remember the name of the insurance company, much to the chagrin of a nearby duck. Quacking courtesy of actor Gilbert Gottfried.
Starting point is 00:30:08 When I got hurt and missed work, I thought I had supplemental insurance. Supplemental insurance? What's that? AFLAC. Well, even best insurance doesn't give you cash to cover things like loss, pay, other expenses. It just does. What does?
Starting point is 00:30:21 AFLAC. You shouldn't ask about it at work. Really? What's it called? Aflac! Aflac. Without it, no insurance is complete. Aflac. As Linda Kaplan Thaler says,
Starting point is 00:30:36 the Aflac campaign is so successful that now when ducks see other ducks, they immediately think of supplemental insurance. Linda Kaplan Thaler would eventually grow her advertising agency to become a billion-dollar company. Back in 1940, only 18% of the advertising industry was comprised of women. Which makes no sense when you realize that 80% of the goods and services in the world are purchased by women. But that number of working ad women has crept up year after year. And today, 66% of the people studying marketing in schools are female.
Starting point is 00:31:27 The women who were ad pioneers faced enormous hurdles, broke the trail for the women who followed them, and managed to create landmark campaigns along the way. But what fascinated me in my research was that these women achieved success by embracing their gender, not emulating men. They didn't dress in androgynous suits, they didn't golf, and they never gave up their femininity. They saw their gender, and the point of view it rendered, as an advantage. There's also a thread that connects them all. They followed in each other's footsteps by working in many of the same advertising agencies on the way up. And it goes without saying that there should be way more than just eight women in the top 100 advertising people of the century list. So it's high time we
Starting point is 00:32:20 raised a toast to the great ad women of history. Those incredible mad women who kept us all under their influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode was recorded in the Terrastream Mobile Recording Studio. Producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Sound Engineer, Jeff Devine. Under the influence theme by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre. Music in this podcast provided by APM Music.
Starting point is 00:32:54 Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. See you next time. Fun fact. For over 20 years, fans come up to actor Ben Affleck and yell the Affleck quack in his ear. He hates that. But it's funny.

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