U. S. Radio (Jan-Dec 1961)

IS iji COMMERCIAL CLINIC TREBLE-PLUS' CLEARS THE AIR For the millions of Americans who each weekend hop into their automobiles and rumble out to the mountains and seashore, summertime is the season of noise. This is the premise of an imaginative new commercial approach being taken by Cunningham & Walsh, New York, for its clients. Its theory: From the moment Mr. and Mrs. John Doe and all the little Does crawl into their car, they are subjected to a plethora of road sounds: the steady hum of spinning tires, the blasts of impatient horns and the coughs of motors turning over. Amid all this extraneous noise, the car radio is struggling to be heard. To counteract the noises, the average car listener — according to C&W philosophy — will tune his radio down toward the bass register, eliminating much of the treble pitch. When outside sounds interfere with the sound of the radio, the bass pitch is far easier on the ear. This is fine for listening to background music, but when spoken commercials are sent out, the announcer's voice comes in muddled and raspy. The listener loses a portion of the sound. In a season when radio reaches its peak audience — primarily because of the increase of outdoor listening — a fuzzy commercial can be a serious deterrent to successful advertising. This is the theorizing of Tom De Huff, director of commercial production for the agency, who has put into practice his idea about lowregister tune-in in cars. It's a revealing approach for several reasons: (1) it indicates the importance of commercial listening by people driving in cars; (2) it makes for better and more thorough radio listening; (3) it develops a higher quality of production. Values may be subliminal in terms of their noticeable effect by the listener, but the pluses accrueing to an advertiser are far less subtle. Two sets of statistics recently released by the Radio Advertising Bureau point up the importance of summertime listening. The RAB reports that the growth of car radios tripled in the past 11 years, from 14.8 million in 1950 to 42.6 million this year. Secondly, RAB says that in terms of millions of adults reached, radio led television last summer by 400,000 listeners during a week in July to better than four million in September. Taking into account the importance of summer radio, C&W looked into the problem of muddled reception of commercials, and thinks it has come up with an answer. The problem is an old one, but, like a leaky faucet, nobody did anything about it until Tom De Huff decided to test his theories. While riding in his automobile, De Huff discovered he invariably tuned his car radio to the bass end to achieve a softer tone. He found, however, that the spoken word was lost in the process. "I wanted to find out if other people also did this," De Huff explained, "so I took an informal survey of the art and production staff here. I asked them to check their car radios to see where they set the tone." De Huff reported that all said they favored the bass register. "The combination of outside noises and the high, scratchy sound of the treble pitch forces the listener to compensate by overloading with bass tones," he said. De Huff came up with a technique designed to add clarity to the spoken word heard in car radios. He calls the technique: "treble-plus." In the studio, DcHuff instructed the engineers to increase the treble sound during the recording of commercials. Cunningham & Walsh first used "treble-plus" last year during a radio campaign for Watchmakers of Switzerland. The results were so encouraging that the agency now offers this service to all clients planning to use radio in the future. De Hull believes Cunningham & Walsh is the only agency using the "treble-plus" technique lor its radio announcements. He has already demonstrated the technique for several sponsors, but is still in the process of preparing additional tapes to give clients a lucid picture of what it means in terms of over-the-air listening. De Huff is arranging to purchase tapes that will simulate not only road sounds but also the noises people encounter at the seashore or in the mountains. "The problem of outdoor noises in the summer is constant," De Huff contends. He says that the same principle involved in tuning the car radio applies also to the places people visit with their portable sets. For example, he said, "the noise of the wind and the waves at the beach cut into the sound of your radio." What happens, however, when you're listening at home and Lhe tone is not overbalanced toward the bass register? De Huff explained that the technique adds more treble, but does not increase the volume. "We don't add that much more treble to make the commercials sound harsh while listening in the home," De Huff said. "We attempt to make the commercial message clean and clear, but we don't give them a high shrill sound that would make it irritating at home." ■ U. S. RADIO/August 1961 33