Sponsor (Nov 1946-Oct 1947)

CRIME PAYS I ' ontinuedfr tm \><iv listeners for both the salt and Blue Coal businesses. It's mother and sister, however, who are the major interests of George Barr who sells Balm Barr Creme\V hipped Lotion and Creme Shampoo in the South and through the Don Lee network on the Pacific Coast. Arthur Meyerhoff & Company, the advertising agency on the account, has also bought The Shadow on transcriptions for 10 individual stations where Mutual time or where The Shadow wasn't available on the network. These stations include WOWO, Fort Wayne, Indiana; VVSAM, Saginaw, Michigan; KXEL, Waterloo, Iowa; and KGLO, Mason City, Iowa. Barr bought The Shadow because he didn't want to wait for an audience; also because the listeners-per-listening Higli-Powerei Money in n High Quality MtfM is the combination that WRNL in Richmond offers. With a high-average per capita incomeRichmond . . $1,445 U. S $1,117 Plus a high-average per capita retail sales — Richmond . . . $563 U. S $321 Your WRNL advertising means greater sales return for each advertising dollar. NIGHT & DAY 910 KC set for The Shadow have frequently topped any other program on the air. At times, it has risen to a 3.3 when the average program has 2.5 listeners per set. Barr, like Carey and Blue Coal, at the moment is spending practically all his advertising cash on the air. What the three major sponsors of The Shadow spend to bring the show to their customers is an indication of what the program is doing for a beauty preparation, a fuel, and a home-and-farm product, since only the first, Barr, isn't number one in the territory he serves. Sponsor Ifarr Blue Coal Carey Radio SI 45.000 $26.1.000* $175,000 Other Ad $20,000 $45,000 $35,000 EDWARD yrrav tco., inc., NATIONAL REFMSINTAtlVES ♦Includes S20.000 lor radio program advertising in newspapers and $18,000 for radio in Canada. There are other mystery programs on the air that are good but none of the day timers touch The Shadow — in fact no program tops the daytime ratings so often as this inexpensive package. There's a Shadow Comics as well as a The Shadow magazine now. Each of the magazines carries double-page spreads listing the stations which carry the program for each of the network sponsors . . . Balm Barr uses 90, Blue Coal 35, and Carey 84 stations. The Shadow is a big business within itself. It has a family of free lance program writers who do the air show. It has Charles Michelson who devotes most of his working day to handling the show for Street and Smith. The parade of Shadows includes not only Readick, Welles, La Curto, but also Bill Johnstone, John Archer, Steven Courtleigh, and Bret Morrison. When the show hits the air from Mutual Broadcasting System's New York studios, the set-up is slightly on the fantastic side. The Shadow cast is in one studio. In another studio Don I lancock and the actor who plays John Barclay stand ready to do the Blue Coal commercial. In a third studio is Ford Bond and two actors who do the dramatized commercials for Balm Barr. And in a fourth studio there's Dick Willard ready and able to give with the Carey Salt farm and home selling. The master control at MBS during the Shadow airing always has a good case of the jitters. Blue Coal's commercials are routed to New England and the area it covers. Balm Barr and Carey Salt selling is routed to Washington, D. C, where' it's rerouted so that Carey Salt commercials go to the Middle Northwest and Balm Barr to the South. The program itself sans commercials is piped to Hollywood where Pierre Andre stands ready with special commercial announcements for the Don Lee chain section of Mutual. Everything actually runs as smoothly as a well-oiled clock but that's only because MBS engineers are ambidextrous and are becoming accustomed to monitoring one switchboard per eye. There are still a number of legal questions on The Shadow air show. Ruthrauff and Ryan feel that the program belongs to Blue Coal. Street and Smith are certain that the program as well as the magazine belong to them. R. & R., who produce the show, are paid $250 a week by Street and Smith to make certain that there's nothing in the Shadow script that would offend the other sponsors. That fee helps to pay for the split-second timing that permits the four announcers to come out on the nose. In the last exchange of letters between agency and the publishers, H. W. Ralston, vp of Street and Smith, underlined the S. & S. claim that The Shadow is Street and Smith property. Every show that is aired stresses this. Idea on how some listeners react to even the e. t. versions of the program can best be understood through the fact that when Lustig's Shoe Store sponsored The Shadow on WFMJ in Youngstown, Ohio, the advertising manager, Sid Kline, was credited by Youngstown's younger generation with being the blackcloaked gent himself. The result was that while the program was on the air Kline had to disappear for a half hour, so as not to disillusion the moppets. Lustig's program is off the air now because no Shadow transcriptions have been recorded for two years — the network show covers so much of the nation that it hasn't been economical to continue disking the show for the few open territories. But they're repeating available Shadow e.t.'s in many territories that haven't heard the early episodes; 116 weeks of transcriptions are available and since in a town like Youngstown these e.t.'s brought the sponsor an audience rating of 16, which is better than 94 per cent of all network shows, local advertisers buy it — even if it isn't The Shadow of today. The Shadow also answers a question in the minds of hundreds of timebuyers — Mutual Broadcasting System can deliver a top audience at a low cost per thousand, iftheprogram, time, and competition are right. There's the first coal company in the East, the first salt company in the Middle West, and Balm Barr in the South and Pacific Coast, to prove it. 50 SPONSOR