“It’s not the size of the budget. It’s the ferocity of the idea.” - Paula Green\, copywriter of Avis’s “We try harder” In 1963, an advertising agency threw a party for one of its biggest clients. N.W. Ayer had held the De Beers account for 25 years, and the men who ran it were each given a gold watch. Frances Gerety, who had written the line that made the account famous, wasn’t given anything. “Where’s mine?” she asked. Her line was “A diamond is forever.” She wrote it in 1947, at about three in the morning, having realised she’d forgotten to write a tagline at all. She scribbled “Dear God, send me a line”, wrote something underneath and went to bed. In the morning she decided it would do. In 1999 Advertising Age named it the slogan of the century. Ayer got round to honouring her in 1989. It’s a pattern worth noticing. Some of the most famous lines in advertising were written by women whose names most of the industry couldn’t tell you. The woman who built DDB’s copy department When Bill Bernbach left Grey to start Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1949, Phyllis Robinson was the first writer he took with him. She ran the copy department for 13 years and, by her own account, hired everyone who joined it, including Julian Koenig, who went on to write “Think Small”, and two young women called Mary Wells and Paula Green. Her work for the department store Ohrbach’s was so admired that when Volkswagen came to America, it skipped the pitch and asked for “the agency that does Ohrbach’s”. You could say the most famous car campaign of the century began with a shop ad. The woman who tried harder Paula Green joined DDB in 1956 and wrote the Avis campaign. Research at airports found that half of people read “We’re number two” as “not as good as”. Bernbach’s answer: “What about the other 50%?” Avis kept the line for about 50 years. Green, meanwhile, bought Avis shares as soon as she started on the account. Later she sold them to start her own agency. The woman who painted the planes Mary Wells went a long way beyond writing ads for Braniff. At Jack Tinker & Partners she persuaded the airline to paint its planes in bright colours and dress its cabin crew in Emilio Pucci, then announced “The End of the Plain Plane”. She founded Wells Rich Greene in 1966, married Braniff’s president the following year, and gave Alka-Seltzer “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz”. She died in 2024, aged 95. The woman who sent Levi’s to the launderette In London in 1985, Barbara Nokes wrote Levi’s “Launderette” for BBH, with John Hegarty art directing. Sales of 501s rose by 800%. The next year’s D&AD Annual featured 315 creatives, of whom 29 were women, and Nokes had more ads in it than any of them. So why do we remember the agencies and forget the writers? Partly because agencies are named after the men on the door, so Bernbach and Hegarty get the credit by default. The historian Margaret Rossiter even gave this habit a name. In 1993 she called it the Matilda effect: women’s work being credited to the men around them, or simply not recorded. She was writing about science, and advertising has been doing it for just as long. The fix is small and free. Next time you share a classic ad, find out who wrote it and say so. Every great line has a writer, and quite often, her name was Phyllis, Paula, Mary, Frances or Barbara. Want to write lines that last? Our Copywriting course is taught by some of the best writers in the business, and Advertising Masters goes behind the scenes of the classics.