Adland by Mark Tungate

montage of different-sized stomachs over a jingle that became a chart hit. ‘No matter what shape your stomach’s in,’ was the tagline. A short while later, the agency added the iconic shot of two tablets being dropped into a glass of water: ‘plop, plop, fizz, fizz’.
    The Alka-Seltzer story also reveals another of Wells’ contributions to the creative revolution: as well as injecting razzmatazz into TV commercials, she was a natural branding consultant, able to persuade clients to change their entire marketing strategy so that it chimed in with her advertising. When she repositioned Alka-Seltzer as a lifestyle product, brand owner Miles Laboratories created ‘portable foil packs that held two Alka-Seltzers each and sold them in new places, magazine stands, bars, restaurants… and, naturally, Miles began selling twice as much Alka-Seltzer’.
    This feel for integrated marketing was further highlighted by the agency’s next hit campaign, for Braniff Airlines. At that stage, Wells recalls, all aeroplanes were either ‘metallic or white with a stripe painted down the middle of them’. Terminals were grey and soulless. Flying, which should have been a thrilling experience, was actually miserable.
    Standing in a grim terminal building one day, Wells pictured Braniff ‘in a wash of beautiful colour’. So she had Braniff’s fleet of aircraft painted bright pastel colours. Red-hot Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci was hired to redesign the hostess’s uniforms. (Parts of the uniform could be removed as the plane flew into warmer climes; Wells later ran a provocative commercial dramatizing this as ‘The Air Strip’, which proved a huge hit when shown during the Super Bowl.) Interior designer Alexander Girard, who had styled one of Wells’ favourite restaurants – ‘in a high-octane colour montage of Mexican and modern’ – gave the inside of the planes a new look. ‘The end of the plain plane,’ said the print advertising. Wells and her team had created the coolest, the sexiest – the most sixties – airline around.
    There was plenty of steel beneath her romantic nature. When Marion Harper refused to make her president of Jack Tinker & Partners, she resigned. She took with her the art directors Stewart Greene and Dick Rich – the first calm and reassuring, the second edgy and contemporary – and the Braniff account. Wells Rich Greene opened its doors on 4 April 1967.
    After moving out of its temporary base in the Gotham Hotel, the agency found cramped office space on Madison Avenue. ‘We didn’t have time for decorating,’ writes Wells, ‘although we did plaster the walls with Love posters and tossed psychedelic pillows around and we allowed Mick Jagger to sing “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?” in the waiting room.’ More importantly, Wells Rich Greene set out to hire young men and women ‘who had a gift for cinematic use of television’.
    And this was the simple, complex secret of Wells Rich Greene. The Technicolor imaginations of Wells and her loyal creative director Charlie Moss spawned highly engaging advertising for the likes of Benson & Hedges, American Motors, Procter & Gamble and Ford. Wells’ early success for Braniff attracted a string of airline accounts: TWA, Continental and Pan Am. By the mid-1970s, she was the highest-paid woman in advertising, earning more than US $300,000 a year. During that same decade, she was able to help out the city that had witnessed her climb to the top. Her agency popularized a slogan that no visitor to New York can escape, even today.
    â€˜I lost count of the amount of people who claimed to have invented the line “I love New York”,’ writes Wells, of her 1970s campaign to bring tourists back to the city. ‘Nobody created the expression; it is what people have been saying since I can remember…’
    At the