Advertising Woman of the Year in 1971, Mary Georgene Berg Wells (born 1928) was an advertising executive who rose from a department store copywriter to the chief executive officer of one of the largest advertising firms in the world.

Born Mary Georgene Berg on May 25, 1928, she was the only child of Waldemar, a furniture-maker, and Violet in Youngstown, Ohio. When Mary was five years old, her mother enrolled her in elocution classes to help the child overcome shyness. Subsequently, she took music, drama, and dance lessons and participated in amateur and semiprofessional theater productions. Upon finishing high school, Mary moved to New York City to enroll in the Neighborhood School of the Theater. After one year she left to pursue a career in merchandising at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where she met and married Burt Wells, an industrial design student. The couple moved back to Youngstown where...