The adwoman who blazed a trail in a Mad Men era

When Jane Maas joined the advertising industry in the 1960s, she said, she discovered that women “were kept in a product ghetto.” Maas and other female copywriters were allowed to work on accounts “considered appropriate to our sex,” such as Maxwell House coffee and Dove soap. Male bosses deemed banks and cars off limits, and alcohol “was what they used to seduce us, so that was clearly out.” As a senior vice president at Wells Rich Greene—an agency founded by Mary Wells Lawrence, another great adwoman of the era—Maas shepherded what might be the most successful tourism campaign ever, “I Love New York” with its famous heart logo designed by Milton Glaser. “Lots of men say they are the father of ‘I Love New York,’” Maas said. “But I am its only mother.”

Born in Jersey City, Maas began her ad career in 1964 at Ogilvy & Mather, said The New York Times. She rose from junior copywriter “to become only the agency’s second woman to be promoted to vice president.” Maas learned to operate in a workplace rife with harassment. If the boss wanted to sleep with you, she wrote in a memoir, “you had to ask what mattered more: your self-respect or your career.”

Maas became president of Muller Jordan Weiss in 1982, making her “one of the first women to lead a major New York advertising firm,” said The Washington Post. Though an ardent feminist, she believed that sexism couldn’t be blamed for the dearth of women at the top of today’s ad industry. Women don’t want to be “where the buck stops, the one who has to work all weekend,” she said in 2016. “They’d rather be a highly paid second-incommand and have more time with their families.”