NEW YORK (AP) – “Does she or doesn’t she?” “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” “Where’s the beef?”

Before these slogans became lodged in our brains, they were dreamed up by advertising copywriters and executives with a knack for tapping into the spirit of the times.

A new exhibit at the New York Public Library celebrates the creators of some of the most successful ad campaigns of the last 80 years – from a fresh-faced girl selling Palmolive soap in the 1920s to today’s silhouetted figures with iPods.

The exhibit, “The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue,” was conceived partly as a response to “Mad Men,” the critically acclaimed television show about the relationships and intrigue at an advertising agency in the 1960s.

The exhibit at the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library – on Madison Avenue, appropriately – features print ads and TV commercials plus recorded interviews with the people behind them.

“Rather than just making a big deal out of the work it sort of puts it in a time frame,” said Ed McCabe, whose work with Scali McCabe Sloves in the 1960s and 1970s is in the exhibit.

McCabe was at the library Monday on the eve of the show’s opening to talk about accounts like Volvo and Perdue Chicken.

McCabe, who is 69 and works as a consultant, said it was his idea to build the Perdue campaign around the company’s president, Frank Perdue.

“It became inevitable that he be the guy and that it be about all the lengths he goes to to make a better chicken,” McCabe said. “The idea of doing that wasn’t so original. It was the idea of doing it for chicken with a guy that looked something like a chicken and sounded something like a chicken.”

“Mad Men,” which starts its second season in July, relegates women to typing and filing.

But “The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue” highlights influential women in advertising such as Phyllis Robinson, who joined Doyle Dane Bernbach when it opened in 1949 and came up with “It lets me be me” to sell hair coloring.

Robinson said no one held her back because she was female.

“Not in the least,” she said. “I slid right in and did my stuff.”

Mary Wells Lawrence started as a copywriter in the 1950s and founded her own agency, Wells Rich Greene, in 1966.

“People are always saying, ‘Wasn’t it a male business?’ It was not a male business,” Lawrence said.

“You would think that we were all cowering under the desk.”

Lawrence said she is proud of her agency’s “I Love New York” campaign because it drew on people’s buried affection for New York City and state.

The library exhibit opened Tuesday and is co-sponsored by The One Club, a trade association that bestows awards for excellence in advertising.

The men and women whose work is on display are members of the club’s Creative Hall of Fame.

“I think it’s important to recognize that people made these ads,” said Mary Warlick, CEO of The One Club and co-curator of the exhibit. “They didn’t just appear.”

—

On the Net:

http://www.nypl.org/

http://www.oneclub.org/

AP-ES-06-25-08 1022EDT