Two books for this summer!

A Big Life in Advertising, by Mary Wells Lawrence, is the kind of book that reminds you why you like to read. It’s entertaining, you learn something about a particular industry and market, and you come away admiring a woman who, for more than 30 years, blazed her way through the fast, fickle and male world of advertising.

For those who don’t follow the ad business, Mary Wells Lawrence was the first woman CEO of a company on the New York Stock Exchange. Her firm, Wells Rich Greene, created such campaigns as “I love New York,” “Quality Is Job One” (for Ford), “Flick Your Bic” and “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz” (for Alka Seltzer). This book is her autobiography, a sometimes breathless but always interesting tour of life in the fast lane.

Mary Wells Lawrence saw advertising as theater. There were props, scripts, huge talents to buy and nurture, good acts and bad ones, producers, directors, dress rehearsals, opening days, roles to learn and monologues to deliver – all under tight deadlines with demanding audiences and, in the end, either good or bad reviews. Good reviews meant getting the client: In Lawrence’s case, that included such big name accounts as Braniff, Philip Morris, American Motors, TWA, Midas, Procter & Gamble, Alka Seltzer, Ford, Continental Airlines, Atari, MCI and Smith Kline & French (Love Cosmetics). Bad reviews meant losing an existing account to another agency (as happened with American Motors and almost happened with Philip Morris).

It was Lawrence who put it all together as head of the Wells Rich Greene ad agency from its beginning in 1966 until its merger with French agency BDDP in 1990.

In A Big Life, Lawrence describes the all-nighters, the clutch campaigns, the nail-biting presentations to clients, the long trips spent researching products, the hunt for talented personnel, the need to always appear hip, the effort to keep one finger on the pulse of the all important consumer, and occasionally, the serendipity of it all.

Or, as she writes: “It’s about � 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. Clients always have a wide choice of agencies that would love to handle their business; clients get love letters from agencies every day� If a client fires you and leaves, your agency has to keep paying the rent and all the other expenses incurred for that client until you get new business that will absorb those costs. So how do you keep a client in love with you, how do you keep his eye from wandering, how do you persuade all of his executives who have friends in agencies galore to sit still, how do you become such an important part of a client’s marketing equation that you feel secure enough to let go of his hand and go home to sleep? How in the world do you manage to sleep at all if you are responsible for the life of an agency?”

For Lawrence, customer service was key. That meant, for example, studying up on the habits and interests of her clients. “Everything that interested Walter Compton interested me enough to make me learn about it � [so that we could] understand each other better,” she writes about her relationship with Compton, one of the makers of Alka Seltzer. Because Compton collected Japanese swords and accessories, Lawrence went to auction houses, bought catalogues when Japanese swords were being sold and attended rare sword ceremonies. “I was obsessive. In my opinion, if you are not obsessive in the advertising business you will always work for someone else.”

In the name of customer relations, Lawrence learned about horses, elk hunting, salmon fishing, government regulations, California wines, antique cars, Swiss cantons, mountain walking boots, rare fish, western six-guns, the Boy Scouts. And when she no longer needed that information, she ditched it. “All those elks and government regulations just faded away.”

She describes, in colorful detail, the times in which she worked: How, for example, their ad campaign for Philip Morris’s Benson & Hedges cigarettes emphasized the brand’s extra long size by showing individual cigarettes lopped off in elevator doors, mangled in beards and other acts of “shocking” mutilation; how they dared compare American Motors’ Javelin with the Ford Mustang, designing ads that showed workers dismantling a Mustang and turning it into a Javelin; how they took the grim tone of a nearly bankrupt New York City in the 1970s and sold Manhattan as a destination for tourists with an ‘I Love New York’ campaign that featured such stars as Frank Langella, Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck.

In the advertising business, she writes, “everyone in it was always learning something. We learned in order to get clients and we learned in order to keep clients � We had to be alert to everything everywhere, so that our marketing ideas � were empathetic with consumers every second of every day. The slightest sloth, the slightest complacency and � we fell from grace. � We may not have been intellectuals but we were very smart people.”

Reading this book one is tempted to forget that Lawrence was operating back then not just in a man’s world (business) but in a MAN’S world (advertising). Her customer relationships were invariably with men, since they held the top positions at almost every client company. And yet there is always a feminine, if not particularly feminist, tone in her book, starting with its first sentence: “I was working at McCann Erickson for the money, for little black dance dresses that showed off my Norwegian legs, for my baby daughters’ smocked dresses from Saks and for an apartment larger than I could afford.” It’s clear this won’t be your average button-downed business book.

Yet she manages to integrate her essential femininity with a hard-driving, pragmatic realism about the business world. As she writes: “I was one of the few women I knew in those days who had bit off what businessmen were chewing, who was performing a man’s job in a man’s world, in a business I had created from scratch the way men did. I didn’t think I had to change my clothing or my personality or have a sex change to be successful. I was willing to do what it took – to work hard, make decisions, accept the ultimate responsibility, provide the leadership and the goals � I was also willing to accept the guilt of not giving enough of myself to almost anybody, just as businessmen were used to doing. I wanted a big life. I worked as a man worked. I didn’t preach it, I did it � From what I could see, men in business were competitive with anything that walked or talked.”

The characters Lawrence encounters during her career show up in often humorous anecdotes: She meets Orson Welles while shooting a Betty Crocker risotto commercial for General Mills. She has a brief and just plain weird experience with Salvador Dali while trying to commission him to produce surreal paintings of the stomach for an Alka Seltzer ad. She hooks up with Jack Warner to produce a movie called “Dirty Little Billy,” that draws waves of actual hissing at a San Francisco Film Festival preview.

And when the money comes pouring in, she and Harding Lawrence, her second husband and former head of Braniff Airlines, live a jet set life style. At their renovated villa in the south of France, they entertain a series of high-profile guests, ranging from Henry Ford to Princess Grace of Monaco.

But A Big Life isn’t always about the next big ad campaign and high-profile CEOs. One of the book’s appeals is that Lawrence takes the reader with her as she ages, through the fatigue that eventually sets in after decades of a demanding, exhausting career; through the two bouts with cancer that are, as she describes them, the antithesis of the glamorous, fast-paced and independent life she was used to; through the failure of her own first marriage; and through the realization that by the 1990s the ad world had changed enough that there was no longer room for her type of agency. “Clients’ businesses were getting vaster,” she writes. “They weren’t just global, they were on their way to becoming universal. With all that reach they had to become more and more hierarchical, and top executives could no longer feel their fingers or their toes. CEOs weren’t looking to their advertising agencies for salvation; clients didn’t ask them for miracles, didn’t expect any magic. They looked to their own financial resources, acquisitions, groups, systems, networks, to ever-increasing size to increase their value.”

But what eventually made Lawrence sell her agency was that “I was getting in the way of people who couldn’t fully develop their own selves as long as I was there � I was too much of a symbol �. Ultimately, the Mariology at Wells Rich Greene, which had created its success, would stifle the spirit of the place � Besides, whether I liked it or not, Wells Rich Greene simply had to move on and globalize.”

The result was the merger with BDDP, which ultimately proved to be a disaster. Wells BDDP closed down in 1998.

It had been a long run for Lawrence. A Big Life (in advertising) takes us along for the ride. There are a few small bumps along the way: She uses too many gushing, hyperbolized adjectives to describe the seemingly endless talents of innumerable clients and colleagues. And she strings together too many long clauses into irritatingly disjointed sentences. But overall, her book is a high-energy, emotional and ultimately educational look at a world that most of us know as consumers of ads that, these days, bombard us from every conceivable space through every conceivable medium.

Lawrence, after all, knows what makes good copy. “You need to have an open mind, the nosiness of a detective and [you need 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.

“Advertising, in any form, is about telling stories that captivate readers or viewers and persuade them to buy products. ‘I love you’ is a sales story – a very persuasive story. Doyle Dane Bernbach [where she once worked] told very talented stories and turned an ugly little car [the VW] into a beloved icon. Talented storytelling has turned Nike running shoes into one of the hippest and snobbiest symbols of all time. You can tell stories in many ways�”

Rescue Ferrets at Sea (Ferret Chronicles #1), by Richard Bach, one of my favourite authors, is a tale of the pursuit of ideals, of the value of teamwork, an action portrait of those who believe that the rescue of life is the highest calling.