Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1964)

PROBING THE CURRENTS AND UNDERCURRENTS OF BROADCAST ADVERTISING Sponsor carried in its Nov. 16 issue. Sucli breakouts as these: (1) the top 15 agencies accounted for 56 percent of the year's spot tv billings, (2) the top 20 agencies delivered 64 percent, (3) the top 25 agencies furnished 70 percent of the total, (4) 80 percent of the billings derived from agencies with main offices in New York. Added note: five of the top 25 tv-radio agencies had their number one bases in cities other than New York. Code exempt: premiums, contests Latest issue settled by the NAB's tv code review contingent: whether premiums fall within the purview of the multi-product amendment. The decision is that they don't. In other words, a premium offer tacked on to a product sell in a film or tape commercial doesn't make that commercial a piggyback. Member stations of the code raised the issue with regard to doll premiums offered in Crest and Fab commercials. Also exempt from being considered a separate "sell" are contests and sweepstakes. Miss America: tv set El Dorado Youth, beauty and glamour persist as surefire magnets in tv as well as any other entertainment or communications media. For the third successive year the Miss America program went over the 25 million-mark in total home viewing. The upward glide was both in percentage of sets-tunedin and number of homes. The three-year Nielsen measurement in homes: 1962, 25,846,000; 1963, 26,200,000; 1964, 26,800,000. S-I-U: 1962, 38.3; 1963, 39.4; 1964, 40.3. Tuesday ousts Monday in tv audience Sunday and Saturday remain the hottest viewing nights of the week, but Tuesday has replaced Monday as the third most popular night around the set. Friday continues in the tradition of being the "stage wait" night, a status that dates back from radio. In terms of sets-in-use the current season appears to be breaking all records. Compared to 1963, not only is average viewing by nights up this season, but the tune-in by hours of the night has taken a hike. Following are the average sets-in-use for '63 and '64, with the rankings by night of the week in parentheses: NIGHT 1964 1963 Monday 56.2 (4) 55.0 (3) Tuesday 56.5 (3) 53.0 (4) Vi/ednesday 55,2 (6) 51.7 (6) Thursday 55.3 (5) 52.2 (5) Friday 53.7 (7) 50.4 (7) Saturday 56.7 (2) 55.5 (2) Sunday 59.0 (1) 55.4 (1) Source: NTI, eight weeks ending Oct. 25, 1964, and eight weeks ending Oct. 27, 1963. When should commercials go color? Maybe yours is one agency that has had this question thrown at it: would it be advisable to put in color commercials which would be used throughout 1965? The question is predicated on the estimate of 3.3 million color homes for January, 1965, and an increase through the year of another million or so color homes. Sponsor Scope put the query to several agency color experts and emerged, in essence, with this consensus: (a) the decision, basically, should depend on the needs of the product, (b) black and white delivers much of the color home audience, anyway, and the point to be resolved is whether the number of color homes merits the added cost for color. NBC-TV premieres in one week? Look for NBC-TV to unveil its 1965-66 schedule all in a single week, probably the second week in September. That stratagem would make NBC-TV's premiere week the same as the one ABC-TV has elected the past two seasons. All that has to happen now for an unprecedented logjam of program sampling is for CBS-TV to go premiere week synchronously with the other two networks. Then nobody could claim that the early ratings were handicapped by later premieres. Incidentally, the competition estimates that CBS-TV o&o's and affiliates spent around $500,000 for the 'atest program spotlight campaign in newspapers. It was the second campaign of the kind for the current season. 28 SPONS