Advertising: Taking Off with Talk

• Share

When they opened for business last spring, the brash young founders of Manhattan's new advertising agency, Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc., promised to "build the most profitable agency in history." With a flair that made even Madison Avenue eyebrows twitch, they started out by getting just about the most publicity in history.

Dazzled by the agency's bright, blonde President Mary Wells, 39, newspaper ad columnists reported her every move; the trade papers began running endless features on "The Gray Flannel Gal" and "The Wondrous World of W.R.G." Soon Sunday supplements, weeklies, even the prestige business magazines were weighing in with more talk about "the most talked-about agency." Last August Syndicated Fashion Columnist Eugenia Sheppard went so far as to coo that Mary Wells's "soft, thrilling voice makes the maddest ideas seem perfectly possible"—extravagant praise, since at the time W.R.G. had just begun to produce its first ads.

"They Come to Us." Now all that free space is paying off handsomely. W.R.G. began this month by picking up three new accounts—Boodle's Gin from Britain, Bristol-Myers' Score hair preparations and the General Mills nibbles called Bugles, Whistles and Daisy's. Last week it snared another: an as yet unnamed Scotch to be marketed by Calvert. With total of 14 clients worth $52 million in annual billings so far, the 14-month-old shop has been publicized into the ranks of the nation's 50 biggest agencies. Mary Wells is certain that billings will rise to $100 million in a couple of years, even though "we don't —and never have—solicited accounts."

Says she: "They come to us, and we only take the ones we can't resist."

An Airline Lift. Some of the come-on reminded Madison Avenue veterans of Adman David Ogilvy's effort to escape anonymity in the late 1940s. Ogilvy sent out salvos of press releases until, as he confessed, competitors complained that "nobody went to the bathroom at our agency without the news appearing in the trade press." Wells herself admits to "a staggering lack of modesty," but her agency has avoided outright flackery—if only because its partners were never quite obscure in the first place.