Broadcasting Telecasting (Apr-Jun 1957)

ADVERTISERS AND AGENCIES AGENCY VOLUME UP, PROFITS STEADY Business status reports, new 'Interurbia' study feature AAAA meeting THREE out of four advertising agencies handled more business last year than the year before, and three out of five made more money in dollars. This report on billings and profits, based on returns from more than two-thirds of the 329 members of the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies, was delivered by AAAA President Frederic R. Gamble at the opening session of the association's annual meeting last week at the Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. Other highlights of the sessions, held Thursday through Saturday: • J. Walter Thompson Co. introduced a new term, "Interurbia," to the advertising and marketing field in unveiling a new population study conducted jointly with Yale U. and Fortune magazine. "Interurbia" is an agglomeration of cities and surrounding densely populated non-farm counties, with a continuous urban strip extending 600 miles from Boston to Washington identified as the first of 14 now developing in the U. S. It's apt to exert an effect on radio, tv and other communications media, the JWT report indicated. • Whitman Hobbs of BBDO told agency leaders that as a copywriter he felt advertising had made great progress in the past 10 years but that he feared complacency and a tendency to "play it safe" would lead the business to a setback. • Charles L. Whittier, author of Creative Advertising, and other speakers spelled out some of the things they like and don't like in tv, radio and other advertising. • Prof. Albert W. Frey of Dartmouth, commissioned by the Assn. of National Advertisers to study and report impartially on "agency functions, practices and methods of compensation," submitted a progress report substantially identical to that which he gave the ANA last month [B«T, March 18]. His final report is slated for submission to the ANA fall meeting Oct. 27-30. • A proposal that advertising agencies set up advertising fellowship for selected foreigners was put forward by Theodore S. Repplier. president of the Advertising Council and chairman of the Advertising Organizations Committee of President Eisenhower's People to People program. • How advertising agencies can serve as "good citizens" at the local level was outlined by Walter Washburn, vice president of Young and Rubicam, in a report on Y&R's nonprofit work in the current campaign to "Keep New York City Clean." President Gamble's report to a closed business session Thursday morning noted that although "we can't be sure yet . . . it looks as if net profits in 1956, as a percentage, were close to those of 1955 — that is, about 5.5% of gross income, on the average, which is about 0.80% of billing." Commissions on space and time continue to form the bulk of agency income, averag ing 69% of agency gross income in 1955. This, Mr. Gamble noted, compares with 75% for AAAA members in 1945 and with the latest census figure of 73.2% for all agencies. Income from service charges has expanded "materially" in the past 10 years, he noted. President Gamble noted a decline in the number of criticisms received by the Committee on Improvement of Advertising Content last year — 41 criticisms of 38 different advertisements, as against 60 complaints about 55 advertisements the year before. BBDO's Mr. Hobbs warned agency management that to "be safe" in advertising is to "be sorry." He feared that although "advertising may be stronger than it has ever been," it nevertheless "is becoming infected by an unhealthy assortment of nervous habits and old-womanish ways." "Playing it safe," he said, is a form of backward thinking that "is turning us into first-class copy-cats instead of first-class copy people." Mr. Whittier had some good words for tv commercials: Garry Moore's for Winston Cigarettes, Arthur Godfrey's for Paper Mate Pens, the new animated commercials for Chesterfield, the DuPont commercials, and the Harpo and Chico Marx commercials for Prom. But he also felt that advertising generally is not as informative, persuasive, and creative as it should be. In tv commercials, he thought it had become "axiomatic" that "if you have nothing to say, sing it." The JWT report on "interurbia," slated for presentation Saturday, said that contiguous cities and non-farm areas now account for almost half the country's population and more than half of retail sales, although they represent less than 4% of the nation's land area. The Boston-Washington "interurbia" is "virtually one 600-mile city" with only two stretches, one of two miles and one of 17 miles, which are not part of metropolitan areas. The "interurbia" development, the report predicted, is likely to have some effects on media of communications. It anticipates that radio is apt to be forced into simpler, more economical programming, making it more a vehicle for music and news. In tv, more efficient "networks" are foreseen, with the report noting that "today it requires up to 13 tv stations to cover northeastern (Boston-Washington) interurbia; electronically it would be possible to cover the same strip with as few as five." By 1975, the report predicts, various "interurbia" will cover 60% of the population and 70% of all retail sales. Among those now developing the report cites the Steel Belt from Pittsburgh to Cleveland; the Detroit group from Lansing to Toledo; Lake Michigan's industrial Riviera connecting Milwaukee, Chicago and Gary; the Puget Sound group; another moving inland from San Francisco; one reaching from Los An SHORT LIFE . . . AND AGENCY MEN, who by reputation wear the ulcer as a badge and have adopted the psychoanalyst's couch as a symbol, got some expert medical opinion about themselves and their jobs last week. Addressing the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies' annual meeting last Friday, Dr. William Menninger of the Menninger Foundation, Topeka, had this to say about the "Mental Health of the Executive": "Advertising is a high-pressure business, with the executive frequently in the middle between his clients' pressures on the one hand and his creative ideas on the other. As a result, I would guess that there might be among advertising men an especially high percentage of them with peptic ulcers or other physical symptoms related to these pressures. "Some authorities have given figures to indicate that the average of advertising men who died in 1956 was 57.9 years — 12 years younger than men in other businesses at the time of their deaths." The average executive, Dr. Menninger said, is characterized by "excessive working hours, yet more work to do than he NOT A HAPPY ONE can get done in any working day, carrying his work home at night and still rarely having the satisfaction of knowing that it is really done." His diagnosis continued, in part: "He spends 80% of his time talking to people, yet seldom has anyone to talk to about his own problems. While the executive has very little time to think about his own personal problems he invariably spends more time than he thinks he should in dealing with personal problems of others. "It is always his problem to motivate people, care for them, understand them, to be a kind of father to them. This is especially true in a field where the principal commodity is ideas, where the raw material is nothing more than white space or vacant time. And in any type of creative field, there is a fairly high percentage of eccentric, non-conformist geniuses — and it is the executive's task to deal with these people, make them comfortable and productive. . . ." Dr. Menninger's prescription? Executives, he said, should try "to make a rich life — and not just a rich living." Page 36 • April 29, 1957 Broadcasting • Telecasting