Broadcasting Telecasting (Apr-Jun 1957)

Strouse Advises Drive To Promote Magazines NORMAN STROUSE, president of J. Walter Thompson Co., offered stiff advice at a Magazine Publishers Assn. meeting last fortnight at White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. While urging MPA to set up a multi-million dollar magazine medium selling program, he patted radio and tv heads for selling the broadcast media on their own merits. In his talk, he outlined challenging opportunities for magazines to get more national advertisers, and made clear that the dollar growth in magazine advertising can be misleading. He reported, for example, that while magazine advertising revenue went up 59% in the past seven years, in many instances page cost per thousand increased 50%. Mr. Strouse warned of a decline in the number of large advertisers in the medium along with a decrease in the total number of magazine advertising pages during a period when new advertisers have been coming into the field and the dollar volume going up. Though tv was a cause for some of magazines' shrinking slice of the national advertising melon, Mr. Strouse indicated tv cannot be blamed solely since the lead in national advertising enjoyed by magazines in 1949 shrunk in 1956 to third spot, giving up the No. 1 rank to newspapers. National advertising budgets, he explained, have expanded at a pace fast enough to more than contain the investment in tv, and have left millions of additional dollars for advertising expenditure. "If you had secured the same share of this additional money," Mr. Strouse admonished, "you would have had $45 million additional billing during 1956." His verdict: "There must have been failure somewhere in the selling job of the magazine medium as a whole." He noted the ability of individual magazines to tell "brilliant and exciting" stories of their own publications and how they differ from others, but was critical of an inability to relate why national advertisers ought to be in magazines in the first place. Although they could attack "or attempt to" attack tv as well as other media, including radio, publishers by their "ineffective sorties" showed an apparent ignorance of their media — '"I might say parenthetically, that I've never heard television people attack other media." By its very nature, tv's major selling is on the medium itself, explained Mr. Strouse. He thought radio, too, has done its selling job both in its "heyday and when the radio boys encountered the punishing competition of television." He noted, "They got together on a unified drive to sell the radio medium for its adjusted values, and during the past year or so have held their own, with real prospect of exciting, vigorously renewed interest in their medium." In referring to costs to the advertiser in buying circulation, Mr. Strouse said there was an even more important facet: the "real difference in the kind of depth of impres Broadcasting • Telecasting sion that is made on the consumer with a four-color bleed page in a national magazine vs. the minute of a commercial on tv or radio or the 1,700-line ad in the daily newspaper." L&M to Introduce New Oasis LIGGETT & MYERS Tobacco Co., New York, is introducing a new menthol cigarette named Oasis, which will go on sale this week in Los Angeles and then to the rest of the Pacific Coast. National distribution is expected by next fall. Meanwhile, advertising plans for Oasis through its agency, McCannErickson, New York, are being worked out and will be announced within a fortnight. Radio and television spot is expected to be a part of the introductory plan. Tidewater's Commercials: "WE'RE NOT interested in little men with big noses and funny voices. Frankly, we want the new look." That's what Buchanan & Co., San Francisco, told Harris-Tuchman Productions, Hollywood producer of tv commercials, when H-T asked for a chance to do something for Buchanan's client, Tidewater Oil Co.'s Western Div. The division was planning a tv spot campaign in about 15 western markets. What Harris-Tuchman conceived — and Buchanan bought, with Tidewater approval — is a 20-second combination of interpretative design and dramatic sound without a word spoken for the first 12 seconds. The spot opens with a pattern of circles of various sizes and colors (the agency is using color tv wherever stations have color film projectors and transmitting equipment) and the sound of a tuba. The circles twist sideways as the tuba sound comes back as an echoed hum. Then, the pictured forms twist and turn and flow and dissolve, blending into new shapes — triangles, curlicues and curved slices of color and shade — while the sound goes trombone hum trumpet hum clarinet. Finally, the flowing motion brings the various forms together into a Fying A gasoline station, while the instruments combine into a musical background for the humming chorus, whose hums become words: "You're in good hands at the sign of the Flying A" (key phrase of Tidewater's 1957 campaign). The "new look" in tv commercials? Possibly. Unconventional? Certainly. Eyecatching, attention-arresting, interest-holding? Definitely. Sales-creating? With the campaign just starting, it's too early to give the answer to that final, all-important question. But Harris-Tuchman, Buchanan and Tidewater are confidently hopeful that it will be a resounding "Yes." Anheuser-Busch Promotes Bien To Brewery Div. Vice President ELECTION of William Bien as vice president with general supervision of sales, advertising and other functions for the Brewery Div. of Anheuser-Busch Inc., St. Louis, has been announced by August A. Busch Jr., president. In the newly-created post Mr. Bien, who is general sales manager, will be in charge of all Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser, Busch Bavarian beer) sales, advertising, merchandising, sales promotion and market research. He started with A-H in 1932 as a salesman, was appointed regional sales manager in Chicago in 1951 and promoted to general sales manager last year. R. E. Krings, advertising director, will report to Mr. Bien. Revised estimates indicate that Anheuser May 20, 1957 • Page 35 DESIGNS & SOUND— BUT NO LITTLE MEN