Top Woman in Advertising Resigns Posts
The most powerful woman in advertising, Mary Wells Lawrence, founder of the New York agency Wells, Rich, Greene, stepped down from her posts as chairman and chief executive on Friday.
She handed the title to Kenneth Olshan, formerly chairman of Wells, Rich, Greene/Worldwide.
“The fact that I’m a woman has never been anything but an asset to my advertising career,” Lawrence said in an interview. “I’ve had more fun in this business than anyone has a right to have.”
The 61-year-old departing chairman, who wrote her first advertisement more three decades ago for a department store in Youngstown, Ohio, has been cutting back on her involvement in day-to-day operations to spend more time at her home in France. She said the transition from her leadership had been evolving for five years.
Wells Rich Greene also announced Friday that the fast-growing Paris-based advertising company, BDDP European Group, had purchased a 40% interest in the agency for an undisclosed sum, and that Wells Rich Greene executives were still negotiating as a group to buy a similar stake in BDDP.
The move into Europe is an attempt by privately held Wells Rich Greene to become an agency with international clout almost overnight--without losing at least a semblance of its long-held independence. And as does a growing number of companies, the agency seems to be preparing for 1992, when fiscal barriers between members of the European Community will be swept away.
Olshan, 56, the agency’s new chairman, said clients actually prodded the agency to make the move to international expansion. “We’ve been approached by clients who wanted to do things outside the United States,” said Olshan. “It was a very frustrating experience for us.”
Wells Rich Greene has offices in five cities--New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and Los Angeles--but no international presence other than a stake in an agency in London. Its annual billings total about $835 million
Wells Rich Greene recently won the Continental Airlines advertising business. It received much publicity last year for its print ad for Benson & Hedges cigarettes that featured a sleepy-eyed man in his pajamas as the center of attention at a surprise party apparently thrown in his honor.
But Lawrence might be best-known for personally helping to put some pizazz into Alka Seltzer advertising--even before she started her own agency. At the agency Jack Tinker & Partners, she helped design the strategy to make Alka Seltzer a product to laugh about. Her agency later developed the familiar slogans, “Try it, you’ll like it,” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”
For Lawrence, who enjoyed a brief acting career before getting into the advertising business, there were few attempts to conceal her emotions at a news conference Friday at the company’s New York headquarters. “Wells Rich Green is my baby. It’s my dream,” she said, her voice slightly quivering. “I woke up at 3 this morning and said, ‘What am I doing?’ ”
Although it is only six years old, BBDP posts annual billings of nearly $1.4 billion and employs more than 2,000. The trade magazine Advertising Age named BDDP runner-up “International Agency of the Year” in 1987 and 1989. Among its clients in several European countries are McDonald’s, Polaroid and Hertz.
For BBDP, the venture is just as important as for Wells Rich Greene, said Jean-Claude Boulet, president and chief executive of BBDP Group. “In Europe,” he said, “if you’re not international, you’re dead.”
