Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1964)

Three times a season, dealers and distributors are hosted by Monroe to Yankee game and stadium dinner with Pat Summeralj. Here three sponsor reps (white blazers) and guests pose with former Yankee manager Yogi Berra, as part of merchandising stunt that packs a real wallop with automotive equipment customers back home. sports personalities that have served as Monroe spokesmen. Building from local to national advertising, Monroe has in the past bought time on the Mutual network with Stern presiding. Last year, the advertiser sponsored National Foothall League Highlights on NBC-TV, plus a warmup program with Dizzy Dean preceding each broadcast of the Baseball Game of the Week on CBS-TV. Also on a national basis, the autoequipment manufacturer has bought space in trade publications like Automotive Dealer and Automotive Industry, where Monroe's track record in auto-racing classics is also a likely topic. (When A. J. Foyt won this year's Indianapolis 500, his car was equipped with Monroe "shocks" and the manufacturer proudly trumpeted its 12th consecutive Indianapolis victory.) Nibbling deeper into the national pie, Monroe also takes an occasional ad in Life, the Post or Sports Illustrated. But "home base" for this sportsconscious sponsor has always been radio. Total budget for this year will run to something like $100,000, mostly for Monroe's sponsorship of Van Patrick on Mutual, currently their only radio network buy. But Monroe has also zeroed in — with bomb-sight accuracy — on a key local radio buy, as well: The New York exposure of Baseball W arm-Up on WCBS, for the second year running and at an estimated $15,000 for alternate-week sponsorship. With the purchase, they've enlisted the services of former New York Giants football pro, Pat Summerall, now sports director and announcer for WCBS. Summerall has increasingly become Monroe's spokesman off the air as well as on: He bounds out into the service-station field to learn how to sell and install shock absorbers and load-leveler stabilizing units. He's signed in for several days at sponsor headquarters in Monroe, Mich., to meet top executives, be prepped on policy matters and how the company's advertising is keyed to fulfill them. He helps merchandise the product with dealers or sales representatives and can be counted on to show up at showroom or showdown, to lend his personal help. And he's a regular at dealer-distributor meetings throughout the greater New York area, whenever Monroe executives and representatives get together. (They sometimes wear lightcolored blazers with the company's winged crest on their breast pockets.) In fact, as Dick Stahlberger, account man for CBS Radio, puts it, "There's a very close working relationship between Pat Summerall and Jack Smith, New York district sales manager for Monroe. Every chance that Smith gets, he uses Summerall as an official spokesman for the company." (Monroe has just signed again with WCBS for the 1965 season and there are indications that Summerall will be included in additional local radio buys to be made after the first of the year. ) Does all this special attention to sports-oriented advertising pay off? Without a doubt. Monroe has steadily increased its sales from a paltry $2 million volume during post-depression 1937 to well over $40 million for its fiscal year ending June 30. And with "more than 50 percent of the market," as Monroe itself admits, the company ranks as "the world's largest independent manufacturer of ride-control products." Furthermore, Monroe is now looking even farther, towards overseas markets like Belgium where, in St. Truiden, it's just opened a new Monroe -owned (and partly Belgianfinanced) branch. This factory will provide shocks for Common Market countries where, Monroe says, more and more of its products are becoming standard equipment. The Belgian production, when coupled with that of licensees in half a dozen other countries plus Monroe's domestic output, brings this manufacturer's shock-absorber capacity to 100,000 units a day. Take a small manufacturing company that's developed sharp wits in order to survive. Apply comparable craft to its advertising policy and what do you get? A winner. ♦ November 9, 1964 45 L