Sponsor (Nov 1947-Oct 1948)

rom 4»o9 :T-I y. TELEVISION STATION WATV CHANNEL. The Family Station serving Metropolitan New York and New Jersey, with 50,000 watts of effective radiated power, from 4 p. m. until 9 p. m. Wednesdays through Sundays. television departments and find the sale of receivers profitable. Thus they have dual reas<jns for using TV. TV weathercasts are being sponsored by a varied list of advertisers. Botany, pioneer user of the medium, is still using its wf)olIy lamb to "predict tomorrow's weather," BVD sells men's shirts, and Sanka sells caffeine-less sleep with weather predictions. It's difficult to trace direct impact of general advertising of the Botany-BVD-Sanka type but all three advertisers have uncovered consumer reaction to seeing it on television. Food manufacturers and processors were among the early sponsors in the TV medium. Kraft and General Foods are still spending a sizable budget on TV network programs. GF buttressed its employment of the visual medium with a detailed study of its impact on the home. This corporation is far more conscious than are most advertisers of its public responsibility both as an advertiser and as a food merchandiser, and its study covered not only the advertising impact of the medium but sociological implications as well. Its research was pro-TV enough for the General Foods TV committee to recommend that the corpxiration get into*tthe medium. TV status Krajt Television Theater has proved to the sales and advertising managers of Kraft that it can and does sell the product it advertises. As sponsor reported in its TV Results compilation for May, just a few presentations of Kraft's MacLaren Cheese created so much demand for this limited-distribution and quality-priced cheese that Kraft shifted its product mention very quickly to a mass product (Kitchen Fresh Mayonnaise). While a number of advertisers are waiting until the networks are more extensive in order to justify the high cost programs which are part of the medium, others are going right ahead and planning to cover the stations not linked with networks with films of their shows photographed off the face of the receiving tube. Details on the costs of this and other types of film presentations are included in a report on costs in this Fall Facts edition. A rough projection of the total advertising expected to be placed on the more than 35 stations which will be operating before the end of the 1948-1949 season comes to over $8,000,000. This isn't bad for a new advertising medium which less than a year ago was checking its advertising volume in thousands rather than millions. ♦ * • aiuonia* users at air*s visual inediuni Thirty-eight per cent of the sponsors now using television are not using radio and over 25% of them have never used broadcast advertising before. With the exception of the fashion field, very few advertisers who have insisted they needed a visual presentation of their product have thus far turned to TV. Most successful TV users are advertisers who have been in radio before and, having learned how to sell with the voice alone, are releaming how to advertise on the air when a picture can and does replace hundreds of words. At the end of June, Boston's WN ACTV went on the air. The television scene is expanding rapidly. The medium was held back for a long time because of the generally-entertained fear that it would cost advertisers hundreds of thousands of dollars before the end of the red ink period. It is not working out that way. Some stations have come to the air with as many as 10 advertisers presigned. Others, in areas which have not been as exposed to television promotion, start with fewer, but find that advertisers pyramid as soon as a few hundred receivers are placed in homes. Growth which took years in the TVpioneer centers. New York, Chicago, Hollywood, is taking months in new video cities. Bar and grill customers added to an amazing number of viewers per home receiver constitute an audience ready for advertising almost immediately. When TV sets are few it's not unusual to find as many as ten pjeople at a time viewing a program. As sets obtain wider distribution the average number of viewers per home drops as low as 4.5. Research indicates that for almost a year after a station brings visual programs into the home the average of viewers per home remains in excess of five. Another reason why TV is making such rapid strides in virgin television areas is that the backlog of program material developed by other stations is available to them. The better the programs the more quickly the audience grows. Two years ago, the visual program cupboard was ( Please turn to page 80) 76 SPONSOR