Advertising: Up, Up and Away with Mary Wells

The Great Air Race of 1967 embroiled Madison Avenue for much of last summer. It began when Trans World Airlines, at a time when other airlines were launching bright new advertising campaigns, decided to throw its $18 million-a-year account up for grabs. Eight top agencies, including Foote, Cone & fielding, TWA’s shop since 1956, spent months of work and more than $1,000,000 to land the business. The winner? None other than Foote, Cone, which won the day with a campaign built around TWA’s current “Up, up and away” theme.

Last week Foote, Cone came down with a crash. After a brusque meeting with the ad company’s officers, TWA announced that it was shifting its account to the much publicized, two-year-old Manhattan agency of Wells, Rich, Greene. Admen were stunned. For one thing, Wells, Rich, Greene had not even participated in last summer’s drag-out battle for the TWA billings. Moreover, only nine months ago, blonde, fortyish Mary Wells, the agency’s president and cofounder, married Harding Lawrence, chairman of Braniff Airways, whose $6,500,000 account had taken her struggling outfit off the ground.

No sooner had TWA announced its shift than Braniff announced that it was pulling out of Wells, Rich, Greene. Reportedly, Ling-Temco-Vought, the Dallas conglomerate that took Braniff under its corporate wing last January, had long been leary of the Braniff relationship with Wells, Rich, Greene, and was pressing for just such a change.

In all, the fast shuffle increased the agency’s total annual billings to over $90 million. And Mary Wells, whose Braniff brainstorms (pastel planes, Pucci stewardess uniforms) did a great deal for her husband’s business, apparently sees no problem in being first lady for one airline and wonder girl for another.