Sponsor (1964)

PROBING THE CURRENTS AND UNDERCURRENTS OF BROADCAST ADVERTISING Pink ham's twin areas. What Vitt's joining Bates will do to that agency's media-programing organizational structure will probably not be manifest for a week or two. Vitt moved into DCS&S eight years ago from Biow where he had been a timebuyer. B&B loaded with test products Happy tidings for spot out of General Foods and Benton & Bowles. GF's two test products, which are described as having a fabulous outlook — if they click: (1) Sodaburst, now in three or four southern tv-radio markets; (2) Birdscye Vacuum-Sealed Seafood, in two midwest tv markets. Sodaburst's a frozen cylinder which, when dropped into water, becomes an ice cream soda with syrup. The seafood line consists of fillet of steak, codfish fingers and scallops with lime and sauce packed in a cellophane envelope ready for boiling. Another product in test out of B&B: Mead, Johnson's Good Measure, with the starting line consisting of a canned beef stew, a chicken mixture and a chili con carne. This piece of business could go as high as $4 million. ABC hesitant re Colgate's 'Challenge' ABC-TV's Tom Moore and Colgate evidently can't see eye to eye about spotting Colgate's new daytime serial, Time of Challenge, into the network's 3:30 to 4 p.m. strip this fall. Colgate likes to control its program when it can and Moore isn't disposed to go along. Challenge, written by Peer Oppenheimer, would follow General Hospital. Colgate owns The Doctors, currently on NBC-TV. Some hope may be held out to Colgate: ABC-TV wants to survey the whole field of daytime product availability before locking-in the fall schedule and there's always the possibility of a change of attitude over the course of a month. Decision on 'Queen1 deferred ABC-TV has not as yet given Queen for a Day official notice but it is now considering replacing it this fall with Donna Reed reruns. The network says that it's still up in the air about Queen and is scrutinizing the strip's ratings closely from week to week. Meantime, NBC-TV daytime programing reports that it has been solicited by a representative of the Queen packager. The show, as a tv operation, had originally been with NBC. New sports idea for local tv New programing idea making the rounds of Madison Avenue: Benny the Fan. It's for development at the local level. Based on split-screen technique. Invited fans submit questions and prefilmed sports celebrities answer them. Price being asked for 25 markets, with the show to be scheduled between 6 and 8 Sunday evening, is $20,000 a commercial minute. Tv not moving in moving business Bureau of Missing Business for tv: the moving, hauling and storage category. According to a Michigan University study, 37 million American families will move this year and there arc 18.000 moving van operators, but as far as tv is concerned revenue from all this is on the vanishing side. Last year the whole industry spent $655,900 in spot and $68,700 in network tv. The increase over 1962 was negligible. Coming down to the latest figures — a comparison of spot tv for the first quarter of each of last three years: 1962, $212,600; 1963, $290,400; 1964, $10.200. Madison Avenue's Friday fadeout Stations waiting on a Friday afternoon for a confirmation out of New York may have to reconcile themselves to this: the decision-maker may, like a lot of his fellow Madison Avenueites, have succumbed to the Friday afternoon fadeaway. Put more plainly: the four-and-a-halfdays-a-week syndrome. Attending the Friday scram is a special ritual. On the way out the boss tells his secretary that it'll be a longer lunch than usual. The sophisticated secretary knows her cue. Callers are assured from 2 o'clock on 20 SPONSOR