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COVERAGE MAPS
{Continued from page 38)
kets are not profitable to sell. In main cases 30% of a territory mav deliver 90% of the business of that area. The other 70% is territory that cannot be served economically and thus is outside the true merchandisable area of the station. Merchandisable area coverage maps, if adequately presented, show both the retail sales (per county or total area) and the population of the territory covered. These coverage maps thus clearly indicate how much it will cost an advertiser to reach a prospect. Most advertisers know what share of the retail dollar they can hope to snare. Having the total retail sales figure for a station's coverage area enables an advertiser to properl) gauge his advertising costs on the basis of an actual sales objective. Thus a merchandisable area coverage map translates coverage, as far as any map can, in terms of what a station can deliver in sales. It does not guarantee complete coverage of the merchandisable area because only the actual rating for the time period bought can do that.
The perfect blueprint for a coverage map includes a merchandisable area contour, the retail sales figures for the area (preferably on a county-bycounty basis) and the population of the area. The map should indicate the base upon which the coverage is determined, and the date on which the survey was made. To be truly helpful a daytime map should be based upon the hours between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Coverage maps are still being sent timebuyers that are drawn with a compass and have no relation to any survey method. While it's true that the coverage of an FM or TV transmitter can be approximated by a compass as long as the height of the transmitter and the power are known, even an FM or TV station coverage is individual due to electronic freaks about which not even Major Armstrong (discoverer of FM) or the greatest TV engineers can be too certain. AM station coverage can never be plotted with a compass.
Standardization of coverage maps would be of great help to all timebuyers but that won't be possible until research has answered a great many questions which stand in the way of making any coverage map deliver the timebuying answers. * * *
GAS AND OIL
{Continued from page 28)
reacted to it with much more enthusiasm than the) had shown for Highways. Cities Service, like American Oil. does not use selective radio or TV, but it does offer dealers co-op assistance (a 50-50 split) and advice in getting on the air themselves. Many of the bigger ones are on radio, and one Cities Service distributor (Petrol Corp. of Philadelphia) is on TV with weeklv two-hour-long boxing matches on WFIL-TV, Philadelphia.
American Oil and Cities Service are more or less the exceptions to the thought that direct selling is needed in gas-and-oil broadcast advertising. This does not, by any means, rule out oil's use of institutional air advertising, which has always played an important part with refiners, many of whom are still trying to live down the bad taste in the public's mouth caused by the trust-busting cases the government lodged against them in the early years of the 20th century. Institutional air campaigns, like those of Texas, Standard Oil, and Socony-Vacuum, lend considerable prestige to a firm w ith upper-income buyers and with important dealers.
Thus, the Texas Company, probably the largest dollar-volume advertiser in the oil industry, with a radio budgel of over $4,000,000, feels that the broadcasting of the Metropolitan Opera's productions on a network of nearly 300 stations in the U. S. and Canada (See: Oil and the Opera. SPONSOR, January, 1948) brings them a large amount of good will — a publicsentiment that Texas sees as being capable of conversion to profit at Texas' 36,000 dealers in the U. S. and 6.000 dealers of the McColl-Frontenac Oil Co. (Texas' Canadian affiliate). "Cood will" is not enough for Texas. It sponsors the Milton Berle Show on \BC to do a selling job in radio whose direct approach complements the opera's institutional approach. Texas is also the proud owner of the highest-rated show on the visual air. The Texaco Star Theater (again with the ubiquitous Berle), and the integrated TV commercials with the Texaco pitchman bring in an eye opening sponsor identification that has run as high as 98.2. The two Berle shows have done wonders in upping Texaco sales, and Texas believes that its selling problems have been large!) solved bv the combination of the in
stitutional operatic airings and the lianklv direct-selling Berle slum-.
Of the two remaining major oil
firms w 1 tarket their products (and
air-sell them, or their firm names) on a near national basis, one of them, Gull Oil, uses much the same broad approach to air advertising that Texas uses. The other firm, Standard Oil Co. (N. J.) has been sponsoring the highlyinstitutional New York Philharmonic S\m phony on 163 CBS stations to build public acceptance for the Standard Oil name. However, the various Standard divisions, subsidiaries, and related companies who use broadcast advertising do so on a primarily selling approach, via selective radio and TV, designed solely to bring in the business. The only exception to this among the Standard divisions is Standard of California, which follows the Texas formula rather closely, sponsoring The Standard Hour and The Standard School Broadcast regionally on the West Coast, but balancing this effort with a comedy show called Let George Do It, which carries the load of selling California Standard's line of automotive products.
Gulf Oil has learned its radio and TV formulas the hard way. Gulf has been a big airtime buyer since the early days of the medium. The firm's radio case histories have run the gamut, as is true of most of the major oil firms, from the initial days of ''good music" programing, through the era of name bands and big nighttime comedy shows, to its present radio-TV presentation, We The People. The show at times has a faint air of public service about it, but generally the commercials are designed to help the thousands of Gulf dealers sell their stock. The company is also sponsoring a second TV show. Gulf Road Shou .
It is with the smaller oil firms, who distribute and market their products regionally, or in a few states, that broadcast advertising designed to sell the product, rather than the firm name, is used to the fullest extent. Oil firms have definite regional marketing problems, and the selling done by Texas or Gulf at the national level can never be as finite I unless cut-ins are used I as that of the firm using selective radio or TV. For example, the business of plugging seasonal oil changes alone, or of selling the profitable sideline of insecticides, varies with different parts of the countiv as Summer or Winter sets in. At selective and regional levels, too, oil firms aim their
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