Sponsor (July-Dec 1954)

KADIO DEFAR1 ! lien von <K Krkhardt Inc r" Recorded spot #9 QjUARTEH ■, ; 1 rcury engii i un I r the hood Ls one hundred ' :. Lxtj hcrsr; add thi t ti „ . stati .tic Join tho swing to Mercury, 1 -;iru is in s i iercury. triple v Lui Ln that wcndei tercury — tht finest :ar wl :1 . r_ thi irivi il car, Mercury ettlypso jinylc shows writers can still yet attention with radio copy Here is one of a number of cases of top-grade radio writing cited by admen as having created a stir in the industry. It was written at Kenyon & Eckhardt for a spot radio campaign designed for local dealer sponsorship. Its calypso rhythm and clever lyrics proved so catchy and effective that decision was made to bring it over to television. Patti Page sang it on "Toast of the Town," and a few weeks later Metropolitan soprano Rise Stevens (above) performed it on the same show. It is also now a regular feature of the Guy Lombardo tv show 1\ to radio copy, although not in total time, since tv takes more of the budget At a relatively young agency which can boast of some recent copy success stories, a vigorous rebuttal was tendered by the vice president heading up radio-tv copy. He said that about four times as many man hours were devoted to tv than to radio, but insisted that this ratio roughly reflected the billing. ''This does not mean," he declared, "that less time is spent per commercial. Actually as much time is spent as formerly. You might compare us to an ice cream factory which, because of market demand, produced 80% vanilla and 20/'c chocolate ice cream. It would be ridiculous to assume that therefore the quality of the chocolate ice cream was being lowered." He pointed to a pile of copy on his desk. "The fact is that we try hard to maintain a certain tone in all our copy, whatever the medium. This batch of radio copy has been rewritten 10 times. We rewrite our radio copy at least as much as our newspaper cop\ . This executive, incidentally, is one of the few who report that his clients scrutinize the radio copy as carefully as print copy. But even where an agency spokesman stoutly maintained that there was no letting down on radio in his shop, he tended to weaken his case when justifying the spending of greater time on tv than on radio copy. For. whatever the reason, the fact still remained that the attention and interest of the writer were riveted on tv. An example is this agency defense by the vice president in charge of tv-radio copy of one of the perennial contenders for top place in the broadcast billings competition: "It would be ridiculous for us to short-change the client on radio. We still have radio billing, not as large as the tv billing, to be sure, but very substantial. We have to pay attention to it, and we do. We try to do a good job in radio, and if you check our recent commercials, I think you will agree that we are not letting down. At the same time this adman ac knowledges that the tv writer has achieved an importance far greater than that ever attained by his radio counterpart. This, he points out, arises from the fact that he must spend so much more time on a tv commercial, and so much more time with the client. As a result, "he becomes pretty important . . . this is unavoidable." Most significant is this executive's statement that because of the natural appeal of tv to the writer, "we have to be very careful about our radio. We have to watch it because of tv's glamor." Note the admission that a problem does exist. Essentially, this was the stated or implied view of almost every agencyman talked with — that there was a natural tendency for the writer to look toward tv, and that he might not normally be as concerned with turning out a sparkling piece of radio copy as some would like him to be. The appeal of tv is probabh a major reason why none of the agencies queried by sponsor about their copy l Please turn to page 90) 20 SEPTEMBER 1954 33