Sponsor (Nov 1946-Oct 1947)

'xtiWh % *+'A ».»«* Chicago's Medinah Temple auditorium holds thousands but Steel employees filled every seat for "their" program's presentation of "Golden Boy" There was some discussion prior to the broadcast of having a dinner for newspaper men.du Pont local executives, and visiting firemen, but that was vetoed because it would have detracted from the broadcast's being an employee gesture. A reserved section for important du Pont executives at the broadcast was also ruled out for the same reason. At the wellplanned employee broadcasts, the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady sit next to one another and don't know the difference. That goes for the Theatre Guild of the Air's visits to Pittsburgh and Chicago for U. S. Steel as well as the Prudential Family Hour and Jack Berch's peregrinations for Prudential Life Insurance Company of America. The employee relations job of a life insurance company differs from that of most other companies. Fifty per cent of their employees are salesmen, salesmen whose day-to-day income depends on actual sales. These men are hard to sell on any advertising medium. They still look upon the class Family Hour as the Prudential president's personal project. But Jack Berch is another matter. Berch talked with several thousand Prudential salesmen personally during the first three months he was on the air. He wanted them in the act. He made calls with them on prospects. Being an ex-tea-andcoffee salesman (Youngstown, Ohio) he considers himself Prudential's air-dooropener. One afternoon a week he still addresses a group of salesmen and his commercials are sent to all Prudential men before they are broadcast so the doorbell-ringers feel that the show is planned to help them. Jack Berch traveled last season and will travel this fall and winter again — and when the show travels the salesmen employees are never overlooked. Like the Family Hour, the Telephojie Hour isn't in tune with what a great number of the Bell Telephone System (A. T. & T.) employees hear regularly. While the program always salutes the 600,000 telephone company employees, the company is frank to admit that they don't expect much more than 20 per cent of the 600,000 ever to listen in to the broadcasts. Nevertheless there had to be some way in which the employees could be impressed with what the company was doing. So they filmed a typical Telephone Hour with Joseph Hoffman and made over 200 prints of the film (some 16mm and some 35mm). Now over 480,000 of the 600,000 employees have seen the film and feel that the Telephone Hour is their program. The picture has as a matter of fact been seen by millions, because many local theater chains have run it as a short subject despite its commercial aspect, it's that good as entertainment. This is the most successful attempt thus far to film a broadcast show designed to reach the employee. Westinghouse and Chesterfield tried the idea some years ago, but the results weren't as good, either as employee relations or entertainment or in their merchandising implications, as the Bell Telephone tie-up. While the employee side of broadcast advertising is important, agency men stress the fact that it must never be forgotten that a broadcast is, first and foremost, entertainment. The Aluminum Company of America tried to overcome both a negative labor policy and a negative public relations job, both very evident toward the end of the war, by presenting Lighted Windows, the story of an average American family in wartime. {Please turn to page 47) AUGUST 1947 33