Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1964)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

for frozen foods bulging tv docket. This scion of General Foods has obviously learned an advertising lesson from its old man. Green Giant, number two company, achieved its prominence in just a couple of years after late entry into the market. Once in, it moved fast, boosting sales from a modest $3 million gross for 1963 (fiscal year) to around $18 million for 1964 (ibid). Major credit goes to its Ho-ho-ho broadcast campaign. Sara Lee, which started on a $15,000 capital investment in 1951, now spends about 200 times that amount on advertising alone — an estimated $3 million a year. Company executives have long credited much of their success to consistent use of air media. Milady's Frozen Foods (blintzes et al) represents only a fraction of the market — frozen specialties — but it's a product group that looms importantly on the horizon. This company has increased its ad budget from a reported $140 a week to an estimated $3000 a week currently. About 48 percent of it is spent on radio. Of all marketing changes during the last 10 years, according to a recent Nielsen Retail Index on the subject, none has been "more dramatic than that which has occurred in frozen foods." And most of those changes have a direct advertising meaning, as we shall see. And yet the frozen food field is, in some ways, still idiosyncratic. Like any vast, newly explored Yukon, it hasn't yet been cleared of all problems. And, as in any gold rush, the most worrisome problem of all is competition. Here are a few aspects of it: New products In the first place, if there's one thing newer than new frozen products, it's the rate at which they're being launched, according to the Nielsen study. "Many manufacturers now believe that, just to maintain position (let alone forge ahead), it's necessary to come up with new products on a more or less continuing basis." The manufacturers give two good reasons: First, in the current markets a good new product can make a really important contribution to corporate profits. Second, "new ness" pays off so notably that even standard, well established brands, the report states, "are becoming less and less immune to competition from a new competitor." Pros contend, in fact, that a new product, to which demonstrable (i.e., as on television) convenience has been added, stands about 7-to-l chance for success over an estabUshed, but yet less convenient, item. Consider one of the newer packaging trends — boilable pouches (which allow food to be heated without dirtying the pot). Pouched vegetables are selling an estimated 225 milUon units this year, a volume that's conservatively expected to reach 1 bilUon units by 1968. Trade sources hold that a real December 28, 1964 31