Maris Schilling

Tenacious Team Transformer

Bernstein might never have found her way into medical marketing were it not for fellow inductee Maris Schilling. As Bernstein tells it, the two of them had a common connection: Schilling’s boyfriend worked with the mother of Bernstein’s boyfriend. Schilling, already ensconced at GTFH, connected Bernstein with agency leaders and namesakes Jane Townsend and Alan Gross.

Schilling’s own path into the business was even more unconventional. While working as a secretary at Klemtner Advertising, she heard rumblings that a key client wasn’t buying what the agency was selling. Off-handedly, she suggested an idea that not only bridged the divide, but evolved into an award-winning campaign that ran for three years.

From that point onward, the clerical work was handled by somebody else. Following stints on the copy teams at William Douglas McAdams and Lavey Wolff, Swift, GTFH hired her as VP, group copy supervisor. Though she stayed for only three years, it was here that Schilling’s star ascended.

By way of example, GTFH founding partner and 2011 MAHF inductee Jane Townsend points to a campaign the agency created for Squibb’s hydrocortisone in the early 1980s. The central concept was that, if a person’s skin could talk for itself, it would ask for hydrocortisone.

The TV execution faced some pushback. Networks wouldn’t air the commercial because the actor dressed up as the skin – Townsend’s cousin, as it turns out – had a flesh-colored costume deemed too risqué for the era. Nonetheless, the radio ad won a Clio at a time when pharma and health ads rarely received such consideration.

After departing GTFH, Schilling worked in lead creative roles at Kallir Phillips Ross. She left the business briefly to raise a family and later to battle ovarian cancer. Following treatment, she returned to the business as SVP, creative director at LifeBrands and then as a co-founder of Reagent.

Over the years, Schilling worked on any number of high-profile programs. She led the creative and strategy team that helped Tylenol maintain market leadership in the wake of a second poisoning incident and oversaw the evolution of Merck’s Emend from undeveloped molecule with no clear indication to market-topping treatment for chemotherapy-related nausea and vomiting.

As a writer, Schilling helped craft the Patient Bill of Rights – which is still displayed in hospitals to this day – and a skin care manual for nurses of patients receiving EgFR inhibitors. Later in her career, Schilling wrote a play (“Cancer, The Musical”) and a book (“Medicine Avenue”) about her life and work experiences, respectively.

Still, Schilling’s professional legacy is as much about the way she treated her peers as it is about the work they teamed to create. She was decent and progressive-minded at a time when the industry was considerably less so. At KPR, she hired the agency’s first Black copywriter and, amid internal pushback, installed her on a high-profile piece of Johnson & Johnson business.

Schilling died of lung cancer on November 17, 2020. She had learned about her imminent MAHF induction a few weeks prior.