We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
>ack trail
The road back
What factors led the old time advertising giants (see chart), some of whom had dropped completely from the net radio scene in the early 1950's, back into the fold? Here are some of those advanced by admen involved in the return:
• It is a good media value; circulation and cost are well related.
• The networks have made the medium more flexible, enabling the advertiser to move in and out quickly as he does in spot or newspapers. Shortterm campaigns are now possible.
• Greater opportunity for extending the basic buy through merchandising. Such services as NBC's "Salesvertising" give clients a chance to promote his sponsorship through tie-ins, cutins, closed-circuit sales meetings, etc.
One of the things that sparked net radio's comeback was the drama inherent in radio — the kind of drama that print media, for example, cannot compete with. Packages incorporating big star names were made available and these helped attract into the medium not only some of the old-time mammoths but also some of the newcomers that now dot the radio clock.
However, one agency executive pointed out that the trend of the moment in web radio is now away from the star personality and in the direction of newscasts and "magazine-ofthe-air" type of participating formats. To make any generalization about sponsorship can be misleading since different clients have different objectives and must relate them to their allmedia strategy.
Thus the client who buys news on Mutual may buy a soap opera on CBS and the client who buys Breakfast Club on ABC may also sponsor a sportscast on NBC. Campbell's Soup which had dropped out completely from the net radio scene and which, as late as last year, used no radio except spot, is back this year on NBC. Of the top 10 net radio majors of pre-tv days, four (Sterling Drug, General Foods, Lever and Liggett & Myers) are or have been signed up to be on all four nets in 1958.
CBS Radio is projecting a gain in 1958 over last year, and NBC Radio has right now on its books more firm orders for the first half of this year than it wrote in the entire first six months of 1957. MBS, with the largest sales staff ever, is pushing hard its "immediacy concept'' with the accent on news, while ABC. after the recent abandonment of its "live network" experiment, is now revising its programing in favor of more news, sports, religion and public service.
The challenge now to net radio is to build the investment volume of these clients. One thing, many admen feel, that will hasten its comeback will be for all nets to get together in making public the company-by-company dollar figures as it once did and as net television does for its clients or TvB for spot tv clients. Only then, according to these admen, will network radio be on the way back to the prestige it once enjoyed. As things now stand, with no information on actual expenditures available, no one is able to correctly measure the fresh growth of the medium. ^
SOME ADMEN WHOSE
FIRMS ARE BACK
IN NET RADIO
J. S. Fish, Advertising vice president, General Mills
E. W. Ebel, Advertising vice president. General Foods
William H. Scully, Advertising vice pres., Pepsodent Div., Lever Bros.
SPONSOR • 19 APRIL 1958