The recent death of ad pioneer Mary Wells Lawrence got me wondering how long her fledgling ad agency Wells Rich and Greene worked with American Motors. The short answer: from 1967 to 1972.
This ad agency and automaker would seem to have been a match made in heaven. After all, both had a penchant for unorthodox approaches that relied heavily on gimmicks.
For example, Wells Rich Greene recommended to then-dowdy Braniff International Airways that it decorate its terminals, planes and staff with splashy colors. New York Times reporter Robert D. McFadden (2024) noted that flight attendants were soon “attired in Emilio Pucci fashions worn, and removed, in layers during flights, an idea called ‘the air strip.'” Ads declared that this was “The End of the Plain Plane.”
During this same time period American Motors introduced a series of cars that stood out not because they were particularly good, but rather because they were unusual. Here I’m talking about the AMX, Rebel Machine and — perhaps most prominently — the Gremlin.
A March 11, 1972 article in The New York Times announced that American Motors had fired the ad agency, but no specific reasons were given. Wells told reporter Phillip H. Dougherty (1972), “I can’t explain it. It really was a surprise.”
This was the ad agency’s first major loss since it was created in the spring of 1966. Dougherty noted that in only four years Wells Rich and Greene grew so quickly that it ranked 23rd among the nation’s ad agencies.
Was ad agency blamed for AMC management’s failures?
Why fire an ad agency that had gained high praise for iconic ad campaigns for Alka-Seltzer antacids and Benson & Hedges cigarettes?
When Dougherty (1972) talked with people familiar with the automotive industry, one source said, “Anytime there’s an actual firing it’s a reaction to serious problems the company is having with the dealer organizations.”
Dougherty noted that a more prosaic reason for the firing may have been a personnel change at American Motors. Eight months earlier the vice president of marketing, R. W. McNealy, was promoted and Eugene V. Amoroso took his place.
I suspect that a key reason for the firing was that AMC’s attempt to rebound from a close brush with death in 1967 had not gone all that well despite costly revisions to the automaker’s product lineup, dealer decor and corporate logo.
Calendar-year production in 1971 was less than 236,000 units. That wasn’t much higher than in 1967 and was well below AMC’s breakeven point of 275,000 units. To give you a sense of how out of touch management was, it had projected output of 350,000 units for that year (Business Week, 1970).
When sales are much lower than expectations, it can be easier to blame the ad agency than for management to take responsibility for its own missteps, such as a 1971 Javelin facelift that backfired (go here).
I am also hard-pressed to recall any AMC advertising from 1973 onward that was much of an improvement on the work of Wells Rich and Greene. As a case in point, the print and television ads for the 1974 Matador coupe were remarkably bland for what was supposed to be an exciting new car.
Plop-plop, no fizz, oh what a relief it isn’t
The primary problems American Motors faced were arguably well beyond the ability of Wells Rich Green to fix. That said, the print ads and television commercials that I have come across did not strike me as being as in the same league as Alka-Seltzer’s classic, “Plop-plop, fizz-fizz” ad campaigns.
To be fair, some AMC ads were memorable. For example, a 1968 Javelin commercial offered an unusual testimonial from a young Richard Dreyfuss. It’s hilarious but did it sell many cars?
A perhaps more successful Javelin ad summed up the challenge of a typically conservative American Motors customer driving such a sporty-looking car.
Meanwhile, a 1969 commercial about the mid-sized Rebel did a clever job of presenting the car as sturdy. That was probably about as good of a pitch as one could have made for this aging and increasingly dour design.
Sales would still prove to be disappointing — just over 60,000 Rebels were produced in 1969. That was down an alarming 40 percent from 1967, when the Rebel replaced the Classic nameplate.
What appears to be an introductory ad for the 1969 Rebel showed the car driven by a cowboy. The Rebel was repeatedly described as “the machine,” and a tough-sounding narrator concluded, “Don’t let the good looks fool you, partner, the machine is one mighty rugged automobile.”
This raises the question: Did Wells Rich Greene come up with the Machine name, which was used in 1970 on a limited-production Rebel muscle car? It had an outrageously overamped persona designed to get attention. Yet Rebel sales sank even further to under 50,000 units.
In desperation, AMC changed the name to the Matador in 1971. Production fell to 45,750 units. This was disastrous because the automaker’s mid-sized lineup had once been its best seller. As late as 1966 output had topped 126,000 units. Wells Rich and Greene’s ads may not have been brilliant, but the bigger problem was that after 1967 AMC neglected to give its mid-sized entries the stylistic updates, quality features and trendy models needed to stay competitive.
Ads for the Ambassador also illustrated the challenges that Wells Rich and Green were up against. The commercial for a 1969 Ambassador tried to position AMC’s entry in the full-sized, low-priced field as luxurious but affordable. The spot is vaguely amusing but rather patronizing compared to the Volkswagen Beetle’s legendary campaigns.
Joe Ligo (2020) drew upon Wells Lawrence’s biography, A Big Life (In Advertising) (2003), to discuss how she had trouble defining the Ambassador’s unique selling points. She even crawled into an Ambassador’s trunk to get a better feel for the car before coming up with the idea of giving it standard air conditioning. AMC management agreed to do so beginning in the 1968 model year.
Air conditioning didn’t come free — Ambassador prices went up, albeit not by as much as what AMC charged on other models when the feature was still optional. That didn’t help sales, which fell in 1968. A facelift in 1969 boosted output, but that lasted only one year. By 1971 Ambassador volume had declined 45 percent. AMC’s attempt to enter the full-sized field with a stretched mid-sized car was a flop. This was doubly problematic because of collapsing mid-sized car sales.
Good advertising can only take an automaker so far
The fundamental problem is that advertising generally can’t perform a miracle. If a car isn’t very good, even the most creative ad campaign won’t likely save it.
Unfortunately for Wells Rich and Greene, in the late-60s and early-70s AMC tended to not be at the top of its game product-wise. Although its newer designs were much more stylish than in the old Rambler days, they usually didn’t rank all that well in terms of their overall quality of engineering and construction.
Also see ‘1965-69 Chrysler: Trying to sell prestige in a rapidly changing culture’
Whatever else one might say about Wells Rich and Greene, at least their work had some creative flair. That was missing from subsequent ad campaigns.
Perhaps it ultimately didn’t matter much to AMC’s survival. Even Mary Wells Lawrence might not have been able to do much to boost sales of the ill-fated Matador coupe, the Pacer, or the Hornet and Gremlin in their dying years. But at least her ad campaigns might not have been so dull and forgettable.
NOTES:
Production data are from the auto editors of Consumer Guide (1993, 2006) and Flory (2004).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 1993, 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International, Lincolnwood, IL.
- Business Week; 1970. “American Motors’ crucial year.” Oct. 3: p. 17.
- Dougherty, Phillip H.; 1972. “Advertising.” The New York Times. Published March 11.
- Flory, J. “Kelly” Jr.; 2004. American Cars, 1960-1972. McFarland & Co., Inc.
- Ligo, Joe; 2020. “History of the Nash / AMC Ambassador: 1927-1974.” AutoMoments. Posted June 30.
- McFadden, Robert D.; 2024. “Mary Wells Lawrence, High-Profile Advertising Pioneer, Dies at 95.” The New York Times. Posted May 11.
- Wells Lawrence, Mary; 2003. A Big Life (In Advertising). Touchstone, New York, NY.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES
- oldcaradvertising.com: AMC (1972); AMC Gremlin (1970); AMC Matador (1974); AMC Rebel (1970)
- oldcarbrochures.org: AMC Ambassador (1969, 1970)
Firing the advertising agency makes it look like management is “Doing Something!” in response to lackluster sales. That is most likely what happened in 1972.
With the Matador, AMC kept facelifting car – and each successive change made the car less attractive. Meanwhile, it retained outdated trunnion front suspension (through 1969), standard vacuum-powered windshield wipers (through 1971) and the clunky Borg-Warner automatic (through 1971). One can argue that customers didn’t always pay attention to mechanical specifications, but even Consumer Reports, a publication that would be read by thrifty potential AMC buyers, was regularly dinging the cars for these features by 1970.
AMC’s management was therefore asleep at the switch. That isn’t the fault of the ad agency.
Offering standard air conditioning on the Ambassador may have seemed like a good idea, but it couldn’t hide the dated features it shared with the Matador. And AMC kept trying to pitch it as a full-size car, even though it was noticeably smaller than the contemporary full-size Chevrolet, Ford and Plymouth. Given that the old “Low-Price Three” had grown quite large by 1970, one wonders why AMC didn’t try to emphasize the more practical exterior dimensions (which were coupled with decent interior room).
Then there was a decline in reliability, and a noticeable decline in the quality (both in terms of materials used and workmanship) of the interiors, after 1966. Clever ads can’t hide those issues.
Yup. I suspect that, in general, AMC’s fortunes tended to be more impacted by Consumer Reports’ rankings than the Big Three. My parents’ stash of the magazines is long gone, but my recollection is that 1967 was a particularly bad year for the Ambassador and Rebel. Imagine spending all that money on a new design only to have the Ambassador ranked “unacceptable,” which CU didn’t do very often. I’ve read somewhere that the 1967 redesign was rushed in order to revive flagging sales, but I suspect that this gambit backfired.
Mary Wells Lawrence was one of the few major advertising executives who would climb into the truck of any car. Having worked in advertising dependent media for over 50+ years, I think the advertising Wells, Rich, Greene produced for AMC was collectively better than the cars AMC produced, except for perhaps the Hornet. The adage about trying to put “lipstick on a pig” applies here. AMC could have upgraded their cars and focused on quality, but it did not happen. After 1964, AMC entered the zone Studebaker entered a decade earlier. In 1959, Studebaker (without Packard) switched to D’Arcy Advertising, which created very good advertising (on a budget) for the Lark into the 1960s…but as the 1953 Studebaker platform fell further and further behind the other domestic automakers, no amount of advertising could salvage Studebaker. If AMC had updated its platforms by 1968, perhaps AMC could have stayed relevant as an “American Mercedes”, but not with its existing platforms after 1967.
Have there been any ad campaigns anywhere that significantly increased sales of a car brand or even a specific model?
I interviewed several AMC executives about 20 years ago, and one of them told me that it was because the AMC marketing guys didn’t like the way Mary Wells had Roy Chapin, Jr., wrapped around her finger.
I don’t know if this specifically meant Bill McNealy in particular, but they seemed to indicate that the marketing folks were jealous of the fact that Mary Wells had Chapin’s attention and could persuade him to do whatever she wanted.
Don’t know if this is true or not, but based on what they told me, it was jealousy and resentment that killed the AMC/Wells, Rich, Greene relationship.
By the way, the clip that you’ve linked to on YouTube called “1969 AMC Rebel commercial (Cowboy version)” was NOT produced by Wells, Rich, and Greene. About 20 years ago, I acquired the only complete 16mm print of the 1969 AMC product introduction film called “The New World of American Motors.” I sold a DVD with this film on it. The clip you’ve linked to is a segment from that film, and it was ripped from one of my DVDs and uploaded to YouTube. The Tom Thomas Organization produced this film. Tom Thomas was to AMC’s internal marketing efforts what Wells, Rich, and Greene was to AMC’s public marketing efforts. He produced outstanding product introduction films for AMC from 1969 to approximately 1973. If he hasn’t already done it, Foster ought to write an article about Tom Thomas and how important his work was in getting weary, deflated, depressed dealers excited once again about AMC cars. He’s one of the true unsung heroes in American Motors history.