Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1964)

PROBING THE CURRENTS AND UNDERCURRENTS OF BROADCAST ADVERTISING season's NCAA football events. To get a measure of how tv football has fared over the past three seasons, Sponsor Scope asked Nielsen for a three-team comparison in terms of homes and audience composition. Following is that comparison, based on the tune-in per average minute: NCAA Ratings % Homes Women Men Teens Children Ratings % Homes Women Men Teens Children Ratings % Homes Women Men Teens Children AFL NFL 1960 1963 11.7 13.0 5,290,000 6,670,000 2,520,000 3,140,000 4,500,000 5,610,000 1,080,000 1,120,000 900,030 1 ,350,000 1960 1963 5.9 7.6 2,670,000 3,880,000 1,550,000 1 ,760,000 2,400,000 3,580,000 430,000 1 ,860,000 750,000 360,000 1960 1963 4.1 17.1 1 ,850,000 8,770,000 930,000 4,040,000 1,570,000 8,070,000 590,000 740,000 400,000 1,550,000 Note: During the 1963 season the NFL and the AFL competed against each other on the air for a total of 27 quarter-hours. What they're saying is next for Y&R It's just a topic of conversation among Madison Avenue agency managements, but recent moves in shoring up the agency's upper echelon structure give this reported coming development an air of substance: another switch-around at the top within Y&R. The reported executive blueprint in the making: (1) chairman George Gribbin, who's "got it made" in every respect at 58, lessening the responsibility burden by going semiretirement on a consultant basis, (2) Ed Bend, now president and ranked as one of the ace business minds in the agency field, moving from president to board chairman, (3) Joe Wilkerson, gregarious and a whiz on account service, stepping up the ladder from executive vice president and chairman of the executive committee on all accounts to the presidency. One thing that might be said about Y&R: it's got more executive strength in depth in the upper regions than it's had since the days of Ray Rubicam, Lou Brockaway, Chet LaRoche and Harry Harding. P.l.'s about reached dodo stage Every now and then Sponsor's readers service gets an inquiry for published material dealing with stations that take P.i. (per inquiry) business. Here is news for those merchandisers who would prefer to gamble on mail returns in lieu of rate card. P.I. in air media has become about as much of an anachronism as the studio lined with monk's cloth. There may be some stations accepting P.I. business in the traditional sense, but finding them, interested P.I. pursuers will admit, is almost as tough as getting a second order from a disgrunded customer. The reasons for the almost complete demise of P.I. might be reduced to three: (1) the fabulous comeback of radio since the faltering fifties when P.I. was quite rampant, (2) the inroads of barter on station "surplus" time, (3) the frequent discontent with the merchandise offered by the P.I. mailorder operators. A corollary reason, but not of much consequence: stations and P.I. merchants were never certain as to who was doing whom. Snuff in area media not enough Time was when spot radio could each year pick up a couple of flights among several of the snuff brands. One in the spring and the other in the fall. That tradition, like many others, has passed to tv. But the difference noted in the transition: the schedules are pretty well confined to metro sections — both North and South — where there are industrial plants that bar smoking. In the old radio days snuff campaigns were focused largely on the back country — in the hills and down along the deltas. Snuff's chief marketing characteristic, with perhaps only two brand exceptions, is that it reflects regional tastes. The two exceptions are Brown & Williamson's Tube Rose, which can be counted on for six weeks a year out of Bates, and U.S. Tobacco's Copenhagen (DCSS), which splits its annual 10 weeks of tv into two flights. The king pin of the product is the American Snuff Co., an old line Memphis firm that apparently feels that with the exotic names its brands bear the market needs no occasional jogging up via air media. A sample of American Snuff's brands: Bull of the Woods, Black Maria, Dental & Peach, Red Coon, Big Bear. 28 SPONSOR