Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1964)

PROBING THE CURRENTS AND UNDERCURRENTS OF BROADCAST ADVERTISING Why all the clamor over ratings? Mounting confusion is the key term for the flood of communiques emanating from the tv networks on who's leading in the early ratings. It's a sort of dervish dance that's come to be expected at this time of the year. Amid the pointing with pride and counter-claims, the experts on Madison Avenue— who do the program picking and buying — bemusingly pose this query: who are the networks trying to impress? If it's the viewer through newspaper tv columns, that's one thing. If it's advertisers and agencies, the networks ought to realize by this time they're just whirling up a misdirected storm. The cognizant remain unmoved until the shifting returns settle down in the first or even second NTI. The Madison Avenue experts are also fully aware of the fact that the national election campaign further compounds the confusion. They take into account that there may be wholesale preemptions by local stations of nighttime network shows for local or regional candidates. Also that because of this, network shows on a delay schedule may suffer extended delays. Therefore the tendency among the veteran Madison Avenueites and their equally knowledgeable ad managers is to take the network alarums with a shakerful of salt and soberly await the ratings that truly reveal the shape of things that are. Planned discounts need overhauling? There's a school of station rep executives who hold to the thesis that nothing in air media dies harder than a selling tool that has outlived its usefulness. What they're referring to in particular are the plans that now are as stuck to spot tv as barnacles to a boat. The nub of this contention by rep executives is that the plan type of rate card is obsolete. The time has come, they say, for stations along with reps to review and analyze this motley collection of plans. The objective: to evolve a workable and modernized rate card. The streamlined rate card, they say, should have two main objectives: ( 1 ) reduce substantially the amount of paperwork and bookkeeping for agencies, reps and stations. (2) put spot tv in a more effective position to compete against network. The idea of the spot plan had a simple genesis. In the early '50s stations found daytime tv hard to sell, and so, with the aid of their reps, they conceived the plan rate, principally the 5 plan and the 10 plan. Each was predicated on a lure: if so many daytime spots were bought, several choice prime nighttime spots would be made available at a combined discount. The plan concept, conceived, as it were, in "poverty," grew like Topsy. Now, in an era of "plenty," spot appears caught in a web of planned discounts that may — in the busy times of the year — be reducing dollars and business, especially for top stations in top markets. One reform suggested, if only as a face-saver: give advertisers an opportunity to get the end rate faster without reducing the open rate. Among the spot plans now available: the Selective Plan; the Preemptible Plan; the CWD Plan; the Annual Plan; the Single Product Plan; the Uni-Card Plan. It takes a hardy timebuyer, with the patience of Job and the mind of a Philadelphia lawyer, to keep up with the succession of p'ans and apply them in proper perspective. New record for tv network sales Tv network sales broke an all-time record for a September, according to figures compiled by NBC Corporate Planning. The estimate for a month's achievement in sponsored hours for the combined three networks is always based by Corporate Planning on the count for the first week of the month. The week ending Sept. 6 showed a total sponsorship of 169 hours and 27 minutes, compared to 166 hours and 23 minutes for the like week of 1963. The three-net gain was due to more hours of sponsorship at night and in daytime. Nighttime sponsorship went up 3.5 hours; daytime, including Today, provided an increase of 5.5 hours; weekends took a drop of 6 hours. Colgate likes radio for market tests Colgate's renewed romance with spot radio is getting torrid in one respect: use of the medium in test marketing canpaigns. Latest moves in that direction: ( 1) Spree, a dishwashing detergent powder on the West Coast; (2) another deodorant soap, tentatively labeled Palmolive Gold, around the Midwest. Evidently, Colgate regards radio as a ■CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE October 12, 1964 25