Broadcasting Telecasting (Oct-Dec 1957)

the key station in MICHIGAN'S* MIGHTY MIDDLE MARKET with a 24 hour schedule and 5000 LIVELY WATTS has over twice the number of listeners than all other stations combined in (March-April, 1957 — C. E. Hooper, Inc.) A LANSING contact Venard, Rintoul & McConnell, Inc. * 17 Central Michigan counties with $1,696,356,000 spendable income. OUR RESPECTS to Benjamin Harris Wells T> ADIO-TV are "essential" to the full marketing concept of "total selling" at J-* the Seven-Up Co., St. Louis, simply because they "reach the buying public as no other media can," according to Ben Wells, vice president and director of sales and advertising. "Total selling is a way of putting the marketing concept to work," he explains. To dramatize this theory Mr. Wells travels over 75,000 miles each year, equipped with such props as Indian headdress and totem pole, for upward of 100 speaking engagements. "Total selling is jet-propulsion," he adds, with everybody, including the field salesman, urged to get into the marketing act. Development of this modus operandi at Seven-Up owes a good deal of its sparkle to the personal effervescence of Ben H. Wells, who is responsible for supervising the firm's present $5.5 million advertising program. Nearly half of the regular expenditures go into network and spot tv, plus another $300,000 for the current NovemberDecember "Seven-Up Airlift" campaign on network radio and television. A $6 million budget is under study for 1958. In his presentation ("How to Gear Advertising to Total Marketing"), Mr. Wells removes "sacred effigies" (name plaques for the research, sales, advertising, sales promotion managers) from the totem pole and arranges them in a crescent on a table ("quite different from having the idea hatched at the top of the totem pole and passed, full-blown and immutable, to lower heads"). Then he substitutes cards, replacing the totem pole concept with "total selling" ("Plan It Together, Get Everybody in the Act, Help Everybody Sell"). Mr. Wells abandoned a promising teaching career when he joined Seven-Up 19 years ago. Born Benjamin Harris Wells in Saginaw, Mich. (June 11, 1906), the son of a dentist, he sold advertising space, magazines, automobile accessories and men's wear house-to-house and retail in his undergraduate days at the U. of Indiana (1922-25). He also edited the college yearbook and wrote a daily student newspaper advice-to-the-lovelorn column. He majored in English at the U. of Michigan, also taking a year of law, and received an A.B. in 1929 and masters' degree in 1931. Mr. Wells taught English at John Burroughs School, St. Louis County, from 1929 to 1931, served as a teacher at the U. of Michigan's School of Education for two years and resumed at John Burroughs in 1933. He gave up teaching to join Seven-Up in 1938, traveling as sales contact representative for franchised bottlers and writing advertising copy under the late C. L. Grigg, president-founder. Successively he became sales promotion manager, sales manager, vice president for sales and advertising and finally (in 1951) vice president and director of sales and advertising. During this span, Mr. Wells helped build Seven-Up's field sales organization through his sales promotion efforts. Today, there are 7,500 Seven-Up "sales makers" in 500 franchised bottling operations, also active locally in broadcast media. A leading soft-drink manufacturer, Seven-Up's reliance on broadcast media can be gleaned from its properties : alternate weeks of ABC-TV's Zorro; participations on CBS Radio's Amos 'n' Andy and NBC's Pepper Youngs Family, Woman in My House and One Man's Family, plus spots on ABC-TV's American Bandstand and Sugarfoot and NBC-TV's Tonight and Wagon Train. (Local bottlers buy radio spots in individual markets.) Out of Seven-Up's regular 1957 $5.5 million budget, an estimated $2.5 million was in tv, primarily spot {Zorro is relatively new property). For several seasons Seven-Up enjoyed substantial success with the syndicated Soldiers of Fortune package on a spot basis, but started dropping its 140 markets last summer when it found the opportunity to get into network television for the first time (with Zorro). Mr. Wells makes plain this was no reflection on spot tv and that Soldier did a good job for the company. Mr. Wells, who bowed out as a director of the Assn. of National Advertisers at its recent convention [Lead Story, Nov. 4], feels the "Frey Report" on agency services and compensation methods will have "profound implications and value for use by advertisers and agencies in improving their working relationships." Aside from the ANA, he also is past regional director and education chairman of National Sales Executives, former member of the Adv. Club of St. Louis' board of governors, past board member of the Sales Executives Assn. of St. Louis and is active in Community Chest and other civic and education activities. He belongs to the Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Chi fraternities. Mr. Wells married the former Katherine Gladney (June 17, 1938) and they have two children, Katherine Graves, 17, and Ben Gladney, 14. Mr. Wells lists figure skating, deep breathing, shallow diving, and downhill skiing as his hobbies. WILS neivs Page 26 • December 23, 1957 Broadcasting