‘The Final Copy Of Ilon Specht,’ About Woman Who Created “Because I’m Worth It” Ad Campaign, Begins Streaming On TED YouTube Channel

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: In the history of advertising, few if any taglines have rivaled the impact and enduring power of this one: “Because I’m worth it.” That phrase, deceptively simple yet embedded with cultural meaning, became indelibly linked with L’Oréal Paris, the beauty brand which first embraced that line of copy more than 50 years ago.

The words were the brainchild of Ilon Specht, who in the early 1970s worked as a young copywriter for the advertising firm McCann-Erickson (now McCann).

Her story is told in The Final Copy of Ilon Specht, directed by two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot. The documentary began streaming for free today on the TED YouTube channel, a day before International Women’s Day.

The short film, a production of Traverse32, Proudfoot’s Breakwater Studios, and McCann, has been licensed by TED for global distribution, “becoming the first film the platform has ever distributed in its forty-year history.” Simultaneously, The Final Copy of Ilon Specht has been licensed by AMC+ for nationwide streaming across the U.S. (AMC, of course, was the home to the Emmy-winning TV series Mad Men, set in the New York advertising world of the 1960s, slightly before Specht’s time on Madison Avenue). “At a time when women were to be seen and not heard and men dictated a woman’s worth, Ilon rebelled, defiantly penning a line which doubled as both the tagline for the world’s leading beauty brand and served as a global rallying cry for gender equality,” notes a release about the film.