"[I] had to kind of crawl in through the back door because there weren't a lot of women in the creative department in the 70s. I started out as a communication coordinator there and started feeling my way around to become a copywriter," Wellinger said.
After spending 10 years in the Minneapolis advertising community, Wellinger and her husband moved to Michigan along with their toddler daughter. Over the next 10 years, Wellinger worked as a freelance writer, a situation she felt worked well for her since she was taking care of two young children.
When her children had both entered school, she found she wanted to work in a more consistent environment. Campbell-Ewald had been one of her clients during her freelance period, and she felt that working for the company would be a logical step.
"When I went back to full-time, it was sort of a natural move to just come on board," said Wellinger.
Now in her 10th year at the agency, Wellinger is a senior vice president and associate creative director. She said that the ad campaign she has worked on the most has been the OnStar campaign, which features real calls OnStar has received from its subscribers. She and her creative partner at the time pitched the idea to OnStar, but the company was reluctant to utilize the campaign due to customer privacy issues, so they went down another route.
"We had this big ad campaign featuring Batman that was really about raising awareness and the cool factor of OnStar, but OnStar themselves had started to recognize the value of the calls and had worked on some internal pieces," Wellinger said. "And people really reacted strongly to hearing the actual call, realizing that until you really understand how the OnStar service works, it's a little confusing…I think finally the agency and client came together and saw the power of the actual call, and so there was a desire to have radio be the lead medium because people are in their cars driving and really in the moment."
Besides the OnStar campaign, Wellinger has worked on ads for Chevrolet, the U.S. Navy, and Delta Faucet, among others. She recently began doing pro bono work for the Ad Council, working on a childhood-asthma campaign.
"The Ad Council is an amazing force, and I'm thrilled to be working with them," Wellinger said. "They have the power to change how a nation thinks and can effect powerful behavioral changes that make life better for millions of people. It's not very often you get to do that."
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According to Wellinger, the advertising industry is at an interesting point in its evolution. Thanks to the Internet, advertisers are looking for new ways to reach their audiences. Wellinger feels that the Internet is "ripe with conversations."
"The Internet has become a more powerful tool than anyone could have imagined," Wellinger said. "It lets us reach targets with the precision of an MRI peering into the human body. It offers a deep look into what people think, where they congregate, what points of view they're expressing. TV and radio will always be powerful as broad media, but the Internet lets you reach a mother who is eight-months pregnant with gestational diabetes who just attended Lamaze classes. Try finding her with a broadcast media buy!"
While she feels that advertising is a very fun field, she advises those who are thinking of pursuing it as a career to remember that it is a lot of hard work. Advertising is going through what Wellinger calls "lean times," and people in the industry have to work especially hard.
"A lot of people are drawn to advertising, especially the creative side, because it sounds cool and fun. And it is. But to become any good at it, you have to work your butt off and create powerful, unexpected campaigns to prove to an agency that you can do it. Too many people aren't willing to work that hard, and they're going to have trouble thriving in this business if they don't," said Wellinger.
Currently, Wellinger resides in Michigan with her two children, aged 19 and 16. (Her oldest is attending the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.)
