Jane Maas: Pioneer for women in the ‘Mad Men’ era of advertising in the US

Maas was one of the first women to reach the top ranks of the industry, later chronicling its shocking behaviour in two memoirs

Maas (centre) at the Women to Watch advertising awards luncheon New York in 2001 (Getty)

No finance, no cars, no drink. Those were among the advertising accounts off-limits to female copywriters when Jane Maas was navigating the boozy, smoke-filled offices of New York’s Madison Avenue in the 1960s.

Male bosses “figured we didn’t know how to balance our chequebooks”, she recalled years later. “They figured we didn’t know how to drive a car.”

Alcohol, she added, was “what they used to seduce us, so that was clearly out”.

Products more suitable for women, according to the prevailing view of the day, included washing-up liquid and toilet cleaner.

Maas, who died aged 86, was perhaps best known for midwifing the “I Love New York” campaign in the 1970s. She became one of the first women to reach the top ranks of the advertising industry in the era dramatised in the television series Mad Men.

America’s Advertising Age, the industry trade publication, included Maas among the 100 most influential women in advertising and described her as a real-life Peggy Olson, the Mad Men character portrayed by Elisabeth Moss who starts the show as a secretary and becomes one of her firm’s creative minds.

Maas, who recalled witnessing even more drinking, more sex and more sexism in her office places than Mad Men depicted, had a similarly dramatic trajectory. Ever clad in high heels, a hat and a bra that she said made her breasts into “javelins”, she trekked across the most venerable names in New York advertising.

She started out at Ogilvy & Mather in the 1960s, rising from junior copywriter to creative director. In 1976, she became senior vice-president at Wells Rich Greene, where she worked on the New York tourism campaign that featured graphic designer Milton Glaser’s iconic heart. It was credited with helping to revive the city after its close call with bankruptcy and its worsening reputation for crime.

“Lots of men say they are the father of ‘I Love New York’,” she once wrote. “But I am its only mother.”

In 1982, her appointment as president of Muller Jordan Weiss made her one of the first women to lead a major New York advertising firm. In 1989, she became president of the New York office of Earle Palmer Brown, where she retired as chairwoman.

Maas chronicled her career in two books. The first, Adventures of an Advertising Woman (1986), was an apparent riposte to Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) by David Ogilvy, the founder of the firm where she got her start. The second, Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond (2012), was the spicier of Maas’s two accounts.

If the boss “wanted to go to bed with you, you had to ask what mattered more: your self-respect or your career”, she wrote, recalling the injustices to which women were subjected, and the indignities to which some submitted. The worst offenders among the men were senior executives, she reported, because they had offices outfitted with doors and couches.

As for the drinking, she recalled that her colleagues did not indulge in shots in the office during the morning – one of the few departures from reality that she found in Mad Men.

She did, however, encounter an executive who once steered her towards scotch instead of Perrier because the scotch, he said, was cheaper.

Women, she recalled, were expected to quit their jobs when they became pregnant. And the sight of a woman in a position of authority rarely failed to surprise. At a meeting with American Express, the client assumed she was a secretary.

Maas acknowledged a certain irony to her career: As she pursued the professional success made possible by the growing feminist movement, she contributed to advertisements that perpetuated certain sexist stereotypes.

Among those ads was one for Maxim coffee, in which the actress Patricia Neal declared: “I use Maxim because I think it’s excellent. But – more important – my husband thinks so, too.”

“I look at that commercial,” Maas told Advertising Age years later, “and think, ‘did I really write that drivel?’”

Jane Anne Brown was born in Jersey City in 1932. Her father was a school principal, and her mother was a homemaker. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1953 from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and a master’s degree in English literature from Cornell University in 1955.

She began her career after working as an assistant on the television show Name That Tune, where she first became acquainted with the power of advertising.

Her early clients at Ogilvy & Mather included Dove soap, Johnson Wax cleaning products and Drano drain cleaner. At Wells Rich Greene, she worked on accounts including Procter & Gamble in addition to the I Love New York campaign, which lives on decades later in souvenir T-shirts and mugs.

Maas later struck out on her own as the personal advertising representative for Leona Helmsley, the New York hotel magnate known as the “Queen of Mean”.

“Don’t believe everything you’ve read” about her, Maas warned. “She was worse than that.” She described her time with Helmsley, who was convicted of federal income-tax evasion after boasting that “only the little people pay taxes”, as “the most miserable, abject, cravenly seven months I’ve had in my whole life”.

Maas did consulting work into her eighties. Her professional books, besides her memoirs, include the influential guide How to Advertise (1976), written with her colleague Kenneth Roman, who later served as chief executive of Ogilvy & Mather.

Her more personal writings included a novel, The Christmas Angel (2013), and the book Christmas in Wales: A Homecoming (1994) about her efforts to trace her family history, which she co-authored with her husband of more than four decades, Michael Maas. He died in 2002.

Survivors include two children, Kate Maas and Jennifer Maas Jones, a sister and a granddaughter.

Maas recalled a degree of deception within the advertising world, particularly for working mothers struggling to balance work and children in a business environment that had no tolerance for competing demands. When a child was sick or the nanny failed to show, a woman was better off saying a migraine had kept her home from work.

But men also engaged in artifice, Maas recalled. One of her colleagues was known for his ability to down four or five martinis in succession. “Don’t give me away,” he pleaded of her, when she once sipped from his glass, only to find that it contained water.

Jane Maas, advertising executive, born 14 March 1932, died 16 November 2018

© Washington Post

‘For weeks I cried myself to sleep. I woke up every morning with a feeling of dread’

On 24 March 2012, Jane Maas wrote The Independent Magazine’s ‘Five-minute memoir’ column. It is reproduced below.

Independent Magazine, 24 March 2018

In 1976, the legendary advertising woman Mary Wells Lawrence enticed me to leave the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, where I had been happily working for 12 years, and join her. Ogilvy had promoted me from a junior copywriter to creative group head, given me a small but steady raise every year, and made me a vice-president. I felt treasured.

My career was terribly important to me, not because of the income (I was married to an up-and-coming young architect), but because it was essential for my own self-worth. When I joined Ogilvy in 1964, I had two young daughters, one four, the other only one. In those days, it simply was not acceptable for a woman with children under 12 to work full-time unless she desperately needed the money. Other women looked down on us: we obviously were awful mothers. Men pitied us: we must be married to ne’er-do-wells, or why did we have to work? I ignored the criticism and arranged my priorities as: job first, husband second, children third. My extraordinary husband, Michael, understood and applauded.

Enter Mary Wells. Her agency, Wells Rich Greene, was without question the biggest creative force on Madison Avenue. Mary convinced Braniff Airlines to paint their planes all the colours of the rainbow, put the stewardesses in sexy Pucci outfits, and rename them ‘hostesses’. Every copywriter on Madison Avenue wanted to be at Wells Rich Greene. And they wanted me.

What’s more, they offered me a creative director title, a senior vice-presidency, and $20,000 more a year – an unheard-of jump in salary for that era. But on top of all that was the chance to work on Procter & Gamble accounts. Procter & Gamble knew more about successful marketing than any company in the world. I knew I would learn a lot. And be even more treasured. I accepted Mary’s offer immediately.

What I soon learnt was that Mary had recently been scolded by P&G because her copywriters were not following the almost sacred “brand strategy” that the client directed. The agency insisted on doing breakthrough creative work, even though it was for mundane products like underarm deodorants, soaps, and potato chips. They had hired me for my careful David Ogilvy training in following a strategic direction.

After months and months we finally filmed our first commercial, for the now defunct Prell shampoo, and Procter & Gamble immediately sent it out to be scored by consumers before putting it on air. My commercial – a good old-fashioned problem-solution spot – got the highest score Prell had achieved in years! More than ever before in my career, I felt I was the Golden Girl. I had, single-handed, saved the Procter & Gamble account for my agency!

The creatives all attended the big monthly agency screening, where the top management of the agency looked at all the recent advertising. My commercial came on. “That is the most Procter & Gamble commercial this agency has ever created,” said Mary Wells Lawrence. I thought it was high praise. It wasn’t.

The next day, Mary’s chief of staff came into my office. It’s a big raise, I figured. Or an executive vice-presidency. With an air of noblesse oblige, I invited him to sit down. “We are taking you off the P&G business,” he said. I just stared at him. All of a sudden, I was having trouble breathing, so I panted out my question. “What am I going to work on?” He averted his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. Then it hit me. They were probably going to fire me.

But the axe did not drop. For weeks I cried myself to sleep every night. And I woke up every morning with a heavy weight on my chest and a feeling of dread; I could barely drag myself to the office every morning. My fellow copywriters avoided me, as if being demoted were contagious.

Finally, I woke up. The only person who could save me was me. I volunteered for every chore in the agency: wrote brochures, filled in for writers on vacation, worked all night on new business pitches; I would have scrubbed floors. One day, Mary Lawrence called me into her office, and asked me to take a tiny new account under my wing. It was an assignment from the state of New York. Standing there, I realised it was Mary who had been protecting me all along.

That little account blossomed into “I Love New York”, one of the most storied campaigns in history. It has many fathers, but I am its only mother. It took me all over the world, led me to the presidency of a New York ad agency and election as Advertising Woman of the Year. In short, it made me famous. Today, nobody remembers the humiliation of my demotion. But I do. And when I think of it, I still cry.