TEN QUESTIONS FOR MARY WELLS LAWRENCE

I spoke today with an immortal of the advertising industry, Mary Wells Lawrence. Wells Lawrence was president of Wells Rich Greene, which she founded in 1967, and is now an active partner in launching one of the newest websites on the Internet, WoW (it stands for “Women on the Web”). WoW was launched with great fanfare on March 8, International Women’s Day.

WoW is fielding one of the classiest teams of contributors imaginable: among them Candice Bergen, Joan Juliet Buck, Joan Ganz Cooney, Joni Evans, Whoopi Goldberg, Judith Martin, Sheila Nevins, Peggy Noonan, Julia Reed, Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Wagner.

Mary Wells Lawrence, who will be a regular contributor to WoW, was the first woman CEO of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. As it turns out, she is also an immortal and something of a “foundress” in our new digital universe – Atari was an early client of her agency in the 1970s and she created for Atari one of the first national advertising campaigns ever for a personal computer.

(The interview with Mary Wells Lawrence was posted first on a sister site, Digital Spritz, which features thought leaders and future-speak about the digital universe.)

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Where were you – and who finally persuaded you – when you decided to become part of the WoW Women network?

I was meeting with Joni Evans and a few friends at a Manhattan restaurant called Nicole’s in my neighborhood. We were talking about the Internet and the web and how it really didn’t have much to offer for sophisticated women …for women who have seen the world, who have run or founded companies as we have … or for women who would like to do those things.

The idea for WoW began to come into focus at Nicole’s that afternoon … as did the notion that we should be the ones to start such a site.

How often will you be posting something to the WoW site?

I already am posting to the site. I have a 156-foot-long motor yacht that I really live on these days and it is equipped with two computers, an iPhone, and other devices so I can communicate from anywhere in the world and post to the site from there. I spend most of my time moving around internationally.

Will you be focused on any particular issues or subjects in your own WOW postings?

I’ll be commenting about what I see and hear as I travel. I will spending more time now in New York to help my partners at WoW, but I will also continue moving around from country to country with my ship. It’s a small Feadship yacht called “Strangelove” and very roomy, but short enough to get into almost any port I’d want to visit. It was built in the 1980s but refurbished, and I normally have a crew of 12 and any number of family members and friends who join me on board when they can. You’ll see me commenting on what is said and seen from wherever I might be that day.

How do you expect the business of advertising to change now that the web and web posting are such intimate parts of our daily lives?

Advertising in general is, as it always was, about storytelling. The kind of stories you tell – and the way you tell them – changes as the medium changes. That was true when radio and television were first introduced and it is true now. But the telling of stories as the principal tool of advertising will never go away.

What academic and employment advice would you give to a young woman headed to college this September who wants to pursue a career in advertising?

I have actually already given the advice in my book, A Big Life (in Advertising), published in hardback by Alfred A. Knopf in 2003, and now available in paperback. There is even more advice on the WoW website in a section that tells a woman how to become a millionaire … if she isn’t one already.

I can tell a young woman headed for an advertising career what I did to get ahead – I simply worked as the men around me worked. I didn’t preach feminism. I did it. And it didn’t hurt that I had some theatrical training. Being able to attract attention is at the heart of advertising and some training in stage work or public speaking surely helps.

When was the very first time you used e-mail … and what did you think of it then … and what do you think of it now?

My agency was early into the computer age. We had Atari when it was the pretty much the only company in the computer games industry.

Alan Alda was our spokesman for our Atari computer campaign and he explained for the first time how to put a personal computer together and how to make it work. I think the Atari personal computer itself was only about 64 K back then.

And then we had the IBM account. When we had IBM, we were linked into their new PROFS system which was one of the first e-mail systems that companies could efficiently use.

How best can web-based advertising effectively reach women?

The women we are after tend to get on the computer in the evening and they want something really engaging, classy, and really interesting to them. The most important thing our contributors offer is quality and experience, and I think it is critical that you know that the advertisers that you find at WoW will also be at that level.

So many visitors to our site are saying that they are relieved to finally find a place on the Web where the women who are posting columns and comments have had successful careers, have had substantial and real life experiences, and are capable of writing about things experienced women want to read and hear about.

We are attracting some extraordinarily bright women coming onto the WoW site and they are themselves very high tone in what they say back to us. I think, in fact, we have the absolute cream and that is making it possible for us to already attract quality advertisers. We have agreements now with Tiffany, Sony, and Citigroup, among others, and they are all certainly at that level.

What aspect of the digital world worries you the most?

I think there is always the pressure to keep up with the technology. It doesn’t really worry me, but I recognize that you need to be always upgrading and learning in a digital world. You also need some redundancy, I think, at this stage in our development. I rely on four computers at the moment – two on the ship and two in my Manhattan apartment – plus my iPhone.

Is there any particular individual in the advertising industry that you think provides reliable leadership on where web and on-line advertising are headed?

I don’t look so much to people in the advertising industry for that vision, but I would love to have Martin Sorrell, who is chief executive of WPP, in the same room as Ray Kurzweil, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. I think then you would get a sense of where the future of advertising lies.

Martin’s company owns the largest media buying group in the world which includes J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy and several other global ad agencies. Everybody knows Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – and Jobs and Gates certainly know of Ray Kurzweil who is a brilliant futurist, scientist, and inventor. Ray probably has the best understanding of what’s coming in the digital universe. He is the author of book The Singularity is Near which I keep nearby wherever I am.

Is there any future for print advertising – or will it just fade away?

I love to read. I always have a book nearby and am never without newspapers. Fortunately, I even have a machine on the ship that will print out newspapers from anywhere in the world for me.

But I do think that print will fade in importance. It already has. We do most of our reading already on electronic screens and that will continue and grow.

A dear friend of mine said that eventually we’ll all have our own tents pitched wherever in the world we want to be and inside that tent, through the magic of an electronic screen, you can be anything you want to be – a tulip, a sky diver, whatever. It will deliver a virtual experience on demand and carry you away.

I can’t think of a lovelier future for us all.