the campaign to improve the otb system and deal with pricks will commence
Jane Maas, a Pioneer for Women in Advertising for Nassau OTB
Jane Maas in the 1960s. As a creative director and account executive, she was one of the few women in leadership positions in advertising during those years.
By Sam Roberts
Jane Maas, who, though neither mad nor a man, became a trailblazer in the testosterone-driven advertising industry of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Friday in Mount Pleasant, S.C. She was 86.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, her daughter Jennifer Maas Jones said.
As a senior vice president at Wells Rich Greene, Ms. Maas was widely credited with shepherding one of the most successful tourism campaigns ever — “I Love New York” — which the agency devised for the New York Department of Commerce to help resuscitate the city and state in the late 1970s.
She has also been described as the first woman to head a major pre-existing New York City advertising agency, Muller Jordan Weiss.
In an obituary she had prepared for herself, Ms. Maas wrote of heading the “I Love New York” campaign, which incorporated the immortal heart-shaped logo designed by Milton Glaser and music and film direction by, among others, Charlie Moss, Stan Dragoti and Steve Karmen.
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“Yes, all of these men are the fathers,” she noted in a 2012 memoir, “Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond.” “But I can look you straight in the eye and tell you that I am its only mother.”
“Mary Wells Lawrence was the godmother, of course,” Ms. Maas wrote, referring to her agency’s founding president, “but I was the one who hugged it, fed it and changed its diapers.”
In what started in 1976 as a modest account to advertise upstate New York ski resorts, Ms. Maas, a creative director and account executive, became the agency’s liaison with the state. The broader tourism campaign was started to counter bad publicity about crime and decay in New York City, accelerated by a municipal fiscal crisis.
An advertising blitz featuring an original song, coffee mugs, bumper stickers and celebrity-studded television commercials promoted New York’s outdoor recreational resources and its unrivaled constellation of Broadway theaters.
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