Women in copywriting: 6 lessons from the greats
Brainstorming ideas for my blog and harvesting keywords like juicy spring strawberries, I set my sights on writing about the history of copywriting. So I did what any good copywriter does and I hunkered down to research, pouring over articles and books on the subject while I sipped hot tea. But the more I read, the more I noticed a distinct lack, a lack that tasted as bitter as over-brewed PG Tips.
Where were the women?
It was also around this time that I visited the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, an art gallery in Madrid. As I trotted my boots across the wooden floors, dutifully contemplating each painting on the burnt orange walls, it became apparent that when it came to artists, Mr Thyssen, like the copywriting history documenters, favoured the fellers.
I experienced the same dizzying indignation I felt when researching my article. But whilst I couldn’t change what the Museo Thyssen displays, I could change what I wrote about.
So here you have it. The stories of six legendary women in copywriting, along with six copywriting lessons. Because besides being inspiring as heck, these women have a lot to teach us.
Helen Lansdowne Resor
Copywriting lesson number 1: Sex sells
A young, smart Helen Lansdowne Resor first gained recognition in the advertising world in 1910 at the age of 24 while working at J. Walter Thompson, where she had become the first female copywriter just two years earlier. The campaign was for Woodbury’s facial soap, featuring a man and a rosy-cheeked woman embracing sweetly with a tagline that declares, ‘a skin you love to touch’. (You can view the ad here.) Of course, it all appears tame to us hardened 21st century citizens, but the ad created a stir amongst its 1900s audience, and sales of the soap increased 1000 percent in eight years.
For her Woodbury’s facial soap ad, Helen Lansdowne Resor has been credited as the first person to introduce sex appeal into advertising, and her following campaigns were also noted for their use of visual sensuality.
It’s this use of the senses that we can carry into our copywriting today. Beyond visual sensuality, use words that conjure up taste, sound, and touch to help bring the abstract to life and make the reader feel something.
Besides selling soap and many other products with her evocative ads, Helen Lansdowne Resor went on to start the Women’s Editorial Department at J. Walter Thompson where she assembled and mentored a team of women copywriters. She is known as the most successful copywriter of her generation and was posthumously inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1967.
Erma Perham Proetz
Copywriting lesson number 2: Create content
Erma Perham Proetz was a copywriter and content marketing maverick, whose campaign for PET Evaporated Milk was nothing short of genius. It was a multimedia initiative that started with a radio cooking show, and went on to include a radio soap opera, print ads and other collateral. The radio show was first broadcast in the 1930s at the height of the Great Depression and featured Perham Proetz sharing cooking tips, recipes and stories from her test kitchen, all under the pseudonym Mary Lee Taylor and, most importantly, all showcasing the sponsored product.
The campaign did wonders for the struggling PET Milk brand, repositioning it as a versatile, inexpensive pantry staple. What’s more, the radio show ran for over 20 years and the accompanying free recipe books created in the 1940s are still sought after by home cooks today.
Whilst creating marketing content that retains its popularity for 80 plus years seems like the impossible dream, we can certainly aspire to think outside the content marketing box when it comes to the channels we use and make sure we reach our audiences in as many ways as possible with engaging, useful content that ties back to the product.
Erma Perham Proetz became Executive Vice President of Gardner Advertising and was the first woman inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1952, eight years after her death.
Margaret Fishback
Copywriting lesson number 3: Use humour
Margaret Fishback was the feminist copywriting poet who revolutionised advertising with her trademark use of humour. She wrote light verse at nights and during lunch breaks, while working as an advertising copywriter at Macy’s. As she saw it, the pursuits of writing ad copy and writing poems went hand in hand, which her witty poem ‘A Copywriter’s Christmas’ illustrates nicely.
On her use of humour, a 1932 Macy’s in-house publication wrote, “Time was when advertisers didn’t jest about such sacred things as merchandise. But Margaret Fishback of our Advertising Department thought that a pea-sheller was a funny little contraption, so why not joke about it?”
The lesson? Give your reader a good chuckle (where appropriate of course). Be quick witted and light with your words and revel in the absurd. Aim to make your audience see what you’re selling in a new way.
The 1932 Macy’s article went on to say of Fishback’s pea-sheller ad, “The public not only guffawed with delight, it came promptly to Macy’s—in droves—and bought up those kitchen gadgets.”
Through her clever use of humour, Margaret Fishback became known as one of the most highly paid advertising women in the world, and there’s nothing funny about that.
Lillian Eichler Watson
Copywriting lesson number 4: Poke people’s pain points
With no college education and no family wealth to fall back on, Lillian Eichler studied at night and built a copywriting portfolio that got her hired on the spot at Manhattan ad agency Ruthrauff & Ryan in 1919, when she was just 18 years old.
When assigned the task of selling the remaining stock of the pre-1900s Everyman’s Encyclopaedia of Etiquette, Eichler created an ad that showed a guest spilling coffee on the host’s tablecloth with the caption, “Has this ever happened to you?”. The copy continued, “If you were a guest at dinner and you overturned a cup of coffee, what would you do? Would you turn to the hostess and say, ‘I beg your pardon’? Would you offer your apologies to the entire company?…Which is the correct thing to do?”.
It struck such a chord with the public that the encyclopedias sold out, only for most of them to be returned when readers realised the books were outdated and didn’t match the ad’s modern tone. The publishers were so impressed that they commissioned Eichler to rewrite the entire encyclopaedia. Her revised version was published in 1921 and was promoted with a series of ads created by Eichler herself, one of which portrayed a young woman fretting over what to order on a date at a smart restaurant. The tagline reads, ‘Again She Orders…”A Chicken Salad, Please”. Another ran with the headline, “Are You Haunted by the Ghosts of YOUR Social Mistakes?”. The ads were a hit and the publishers went on to sell two million copies of the book.
What Eichler understood was how to poke her audience’s pain points. She spoke directly to the parts of them that were afraid of disgracing themselves in front of friends at a dinner party or remaining single and condemning themselves to eating chicken salad forevermore. She cleverly painted pictures of specific situations and used questions to get her audience thinking, and those are techniques that are as relevant to copywriting today as they were then.
Eichler became a self-made millionaire and built a mansion in Queens, New York, where she raised a family and continued writing books.
Jean Wade Reinlaub
Copywriting lesson number 5: Research your audience
Jean Wade Reinlaub went from secretary to copywriter at Madison Avenue firm Batten, Barton, Dustin & Osborn (BBDO), where she stayed for 33 years and became the company’s first woman Vice President in 1944 and the first woman named to the executive board in 1954.
A key note that chimed throughout her successful career was her understanding of consumers and their needs, which she gained through extensive and innovative market research. Reinlaub organised around 400 women into different market research panels - the Junior Council for women aged 18-35 years old and the Homemaker’s Council for women aged 36 and over - to evaluate products, brand names, packaging and more. She also founded BBDO’s first test kitchen to develop new recipes and products for clients General Mills and United Fruit.
The innovative methods Reinlaub developed to gain a deeper understanding of consumers were highly successful and were adopted within the wider BBDO business.
Reinlaub’s work reminds us of the importance of knowing your audience and seeking out data to test and improve campaigns.
After her retirement from BBDO, Jean Wade Reinlaub became a market research consultant and has been called one of the “most successful ladies ever in advertising”.
Barbara Gardner Proctor
Copywriting lesson number 6: The power of ‘no’
Of advertising, Barbara Gardner Proctor once said, “the only thing worse than being a woman, was being an old woman. I was over thirty, female and black. I have so many things wrong with me that it would have taken me all day to figure out which one to blame for my rejections. So I decided not to spend any time worrying about it.”
Whether she worried about it or not, the facts remain that Barbara Gardner Proctor won 21 awards for her work at ad agency Post-Keys-Gardner and went on to launch Proctor & Gardner Advertising in 1970, all while single-handedly raising her young son. She even brought the Beatles to the United States during her pre-advertising career in music.
One of Proctor’s legacies is her integrity and ability to say no. Before setting up her own agency, Proctor worked at North advertising agency, where she was fired upon refusing to work on an ad for a hair product brand which parodied the Civil Rights social justice marches. She continued in this vein once she set up Proctor & Gardner Advertising. Biographer Judy Foster Davis explains that she “refused to accept assignments for cigarettes or hard liquor and she also avoided doing business with media companies which she believed had discriminatory employment practices.”
This opened up more space for Proctor to work on ad accounts that resonated with her ideals, and one such theme in her portfolio was positively representing black families. The first client her agency won was Chicago-based grocery store chain Jewel, who she helped rescue by targeting African-American consumers with loving depictions of family meals alongside taglines such as, “Together, we’re good food people”.
Proctor & Gardner was bringing in $13 million annually during the 1970s and early 80s and she was cited by President Ronald Reagan during his State of the Union address in 1984, where he highlighted how she rose from poverty to “build a multi-million dollar advertising agency”.
It’s not always easy (or possible) to say no to work, but integrity is a value worth fighting for.
Final thoughts
Women have been making waves in copywriting for over 100 years and will continue to do so for many centuries to come. This list is a mere drop in the sea of historical women copywriters but from these six women comes plenty of copywriting inspiration to keep us busy with. Here’s what we’ve learnt:
Evoke your reader’s senses and use words that conjure up taste, sound, touch and sight to help bring the abstract to life.
Use multiple channels for your content marketing campaigns to make sure you reach your audience in as many ways as possible.
Use humour where appropriate to lighten your reader’s mood and make them see what you’re selling in a new way.
Poke your audience’s pain points and paint vivid pictures with your words of specific situations, with your product as the solution.
Know your audience and seek out data to test and improve your campaigns.
Stick to your values where you can, fight for your integrity and don’t be afraid to say no to campaigns or clients you don’t believe in.
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