One Of The Most Famous Christmas Ads Ever Was Written By A Woman

Diane Rothschild, a Creative Hall of Fame copywriter, made it to the top of The Mad, Mad, Mad Men world.

Rothschild was elected to One Club Hall of Fame in 2005. It was the first time a woman had been inducted since 1974. Rothschild died of lung cancer two years later at the age of 63. As she was dying, she wrote a print ad featuring herself for the Lung Cancer Alliance that said: “This lung cancer patient can’t stop smoking. Because she never started.”

She began her career in 1973 at the best ad agency in the world, New York City’s Doyle Dane Bernbach. She started her own agency in 1986, Grace & Rothschild, with DDB art director and industry legend Roy Grace.

There, she created the above ad which we all see every year in December on Internet “Best Christmas Ads” lists. J&B ran the ad for years.

When she was inducted into the Hall of Fame she said:

“Based on the world according to uninspired, rigid, time-warped and aging advertising men, I should be home right now in a little apron.”

The story you all have watched of Peggy Olson on Mad Men is very much how it was for women in the business in the 1960s-70s and even still is, somewhat, today (I’ve seen it).

Rothschild was one of my strongest inspirations for getting into advertising in the late 1980s.

Via New York Times.