Variety (December 1955)

26 RAIIIO-TELEVISIOIV VAva&ft Wednesday, December 28, 195$ BASEBALL’S TV DILEMMA: CAN IT CONTINUE AS A LOCAL OPERATION? __. 4 By ART WOODSTONE: A statement less than a month ago by Walter O’Malley, Dodger prexy, has motivated speculation about just how long baseball can continue as a local tv operation. Noted in tv and elsewhere as a shewd baseball entrepreneur, he’s believed in certain quarters that he was reading the handwriting on the wall when he amazed many sports insiders with his blueprint for a network “game of the week.” There’s little doubt that to^ay baseball is still a hefty station bil¬ ler, else why would stations con¬ tinue rivalling each other with in¬ creasingly attractive offers for vi¬ deo rights to televise the major league clubs? Yet the whole trend in baseball is steadily progressing toward the stage where station profits will disappear. It’s felt that O’Malley wants to get in an early bid for network tv support, just in case the local stations do finally back out of the picture. There are mobe night games be¬ ing televised than ever. Pattern is cutting seriously, it seems, into firmer and more profitable night¬ time program patters. There are more away games be¬ ing televised for the major league clubs. Although paid in part by an adjustment in the basic rate, plan¬ ning and fulfilling remotes is a bothersome organizational affair, to say the least. Furthermore away games also cut into established pro¬ gram , schedules, and as baseball’s tentacles spread, there are said to be fewer and fewer ways to get around them. The cost to advertise in baseball 1s spiralling—theoretically by the ballclub’s standards, to keep pace with the rise in tv set saturation. Presently, tv bankioilers show sat¬ isfaction at the baseball co.->t-per- 1,000. Nevertheless they’re trying to stem the tide of growing outlays by demanding and getting more night and away games, at minor and inadequate adjustments in pay¬ ment to stations. And the time will come not too many years hence, it’s predicted, when even blue-chip advertisers will have to refuse fur¬ ther hikes by the teams or else get opt of baseball completely. | Engineering Problems I While the move to greater and greater ballclub demands on local tv is still speculative, there is a problem of more tangible dimen¬ sions to stations. They aren't find¬ ing it very feasible, from most re¬ ports. having to hire a full-comple¬ ment of engineers just to televise some 77 homegames. In effect, there are too many days when this extra baseball crew is idle even though it’s drawing full pay. This may seem ar. immediate and obvious contradiction to stations not wanting to carry more pames each year, but it’s not. according to hep tradesters. It’s already estab¬ lished that stations aren’t paid very much more for away games, and, (Continued on page 61) All Wet? What determines whether two products are competitive to each other? Latest example of the wide divergence of opinion on the matter is Ken¬ yon & Eckhardt’s move to drop the Welch Grape Juice account when it got the Pepsi¬ Cola business. * What makes the K & E case so interesting is the fact that ABC-TV’s “Mickey. Mouse Club” has a strict tabu on con¬ flicting products, so much so that it was forced several months ago to drop the Ameri¬ can Dairy Assn, as a sponsor when Carnation Milk ob¬ jected. So wha’ hoppen? Coca- Cola (which is about as close to Pepsi product-wise as any drink can getk is a “Mickey Mouse” advertiser, along with Welch Grape Juice. That is, in the eyes of the network (and apparently of Coke), the two are not competitive, but in the eyes of Pepsi and con¬ sequently K & E, they are. TvB Wants Some Of Dailies Local Advertising Coin Now that it’s had a year to get over growing pains, Television Ad¬ vertising Bureau, 'with 167 mem¬ ber stations, is going to make a concentrated effort after the New Year to grab off some of that $2,000,000,000 in local advertising revenue that now goes to news¬ papers. The year-old sales promo- .tion outfit is planning to hire a non-tv retail expert to head up a local sales Operation. TvB prexy Ollie Treyz, advocat¬ ing a "gotta grow up on main- street” policy for video, says the new man, who has not been chosen yet, will sell department store ad¬ vertising by and large. Treyz isn’t hiring a man from the industry as local sales boss because he wants a “man who knows every depart¬ ment store president by his first name.” Treyz pointed out that tv is lately becoming awaYe of the dearth of locTal billings. He referred to the NBC-RCA pitch soon before the National Retail Drygoods Assn., pushing the great possibilities of advertising on color tv by means of showing the merchants a closed-cir¬ cuit colorcast. He added that TvB will be repped before NRDA too. Claire Mann’s AM Strip Claire Mann, who does a daily women’s show on WABC-TV, the N. Y. flagship of the ABC net, has been .given a 'radio strip on the sister station, WABC. Show will air mornings at 11:35 to noon, fol¬ lowing the network “Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom,” which was just moved down from that time to 11- 11:30. Calif. Stations In Flood Aid Rally San Francisco, Dec. 27. This area’s tv and radio stations all got excited about last week’s storm-driven Christmas flood, and some did something about it in their news coverage. KOVR, a Stockton tv independ¬ ent with , a combined Frisco-Stock- ; ton operation, sent mobile equip¬ ment to the worst flood area at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather Rivers last Friday (23) and knocked off all its program¬ ming after 2 p.m. to cover the flood. KPIX, the CBS-Westinghouse outlet in Frisco, sent cameraman Ralph Sandiano to the Napa Valley, cameramen Bill Roddy (who also voices a news show) . and Jim Young to the flooded areas south and east of Frisco and cameraman Jack' Davidson to the Yuba- Feather flood area. Davidson shot five films late Friday and early Saturday (23-24) and got them back to- KPIX Mn time to break in on basketball pro¬ grammed early Christmas Eve afternoon. KPIX also got full phone cov¬ erage from its men at Camp Beale Air Force Base and in the isolated Yosemite Valley and CBS made liberal use of these reports on its national tv and radio hookups. Surprisingly enough, CBS-Radio also got some coverage out of KLX, Oakland, the radio adjunct of the Knowlands’ Oakland Trib¬ une. The Tribune, with dozens of correspondents throughout North¬ ern California, probably provided rfiore complete coverage of the flood than any other newspaper, and CBS wisely tied up with KLX to augment its own KCBS, Frisco, and KPIX. KRON, NBC outlet operated by The San Francisco Chronicle, had two cameramen covering flood areas from Eureka, 200 miles to the north, to Santa Cruz, almost 100 miles south, and put on a spe¬ cial half-hour flood show Satur¬ day (24) afternoon. In addition, on Saturday the station flew a camera- continued on page 42) Morn* Shows Take Rap On Nielsen AA’s CBS Radio s look At Our ’56 Start’ CBS Radio will start off the new year with money from new clients and from sponsors adding to their current schedules that will .total into a bundle of $7,500,000 in gross annual billings. John Karol, v.p, over network sales, delivered an ex¬ haustive lineup of the comoonents which make up the fancy figure— an amount regarded as “impossi ble” of achievement a few months ago before the network kicked in with its segmented selling plan and arrived at a prime decision to "go with the talent names” to main¬ tain its stake in broadcasting. The new accounts are: Chese- brough-Pond’s, in with six co-spon¬ sorships of four daytime serials Easy Washing Machine, a quar¬ ter-hour of Arthur Godfrey's day- timer; Standard Brands, two seg¬ ments of “Wendy Warren”; F. C. Russell Storm Windows, in network radio debut, latching on to Bing Crosby’s nighttimer under Seg¬ mented Selling plan; Philip Morris, taking its initial sudser, “Wendy (Continued on page 30) The hew Top 10 Nielsens are in (for the two weeks ending Nov. 26), giving equal prominence to “average audience” (showing the staying power of shows) as opposed to “total audience” ratings. And, as expected, the half-hour show gets much the better of it on the A’s, with only two 60-minute shows on the list (“Disney¬ land” and “Ed Sullivan Show”), whereas the extended full hour and 90-minute format dominates the "total audience” tallies. Also revealing in the new Nielsens is the “just like Trendex” standing of the No. 1 rated “$64,000 Question” and “I Love Lucy” in the No. 2 spot, with the latter gradually catching up with the quizzer. Here's the complete Nielsen scoreboard: Number of TV Homes Reached (000) * \ TOTAL AUDIENCE AVERAGE AUDIENCE ARBs Overnight National Ratings American Research Bureau is going into the “overnight” rating service in competition with Trendex, the only research company currently supplying the overnight service. However, ARB’s new service is a national telephone coincidental, comprising a sample projectable on a national basis, whereas Trender offers a 15-city coverage. New service, which consists of some 600-odd phone calls made during the course of a program from 100 sampling points through¬ out the country, will be supplied on special order only, and will not be reflected as part of the regular ARB national survey each month, as the Trendex calls are (ARB national monthly service uses a diary anyway). Sampling points are weighted in terms of the number of calls from each point, but the average number per point is six. Same sampling areas will be used each time, but different horfies will be called. ARB did its first overnight coincidental this pa9t weekend, when it rated the NBC “Babes in Toyland” and rated it a 35.5 average audience over the 90 minutes. Show was seen in 11,000,000 homes and had a 91% coverage factor. Sets-in-use that night (Christmas Eve) was found to be 61.0%, above the average. The initial rating was offered free of charge to NBC and CBS as a demonstration of the new service, but hereafter the networks (or sponsors) will have to order the service. It took ARB several months to set up the sampling areas and check points, plus additional time to draw the actual sample itself. NBC Tint’s Big Push’ Moves West Tournament of Roses to Teeoff Intensive Color Mobile Unit Series of Pickups - 4 _ A Com’l ‘Act of God’ Chicago, Dec, 27. Foote, Cone & Belding ac¬ counting department received a letter from assistant gen¬ eral manager William Ander¬ son of WOKJ, Jackson, Miss., explaining that a blurb for Gee was' rescheduled into a later station break due to an “act of God.” Anderson’s letter reported “a drunk was apparently com¬ ing home from a night out and unintentionally collided with a utility pole in ' our vicinity, ♦which in turn :broke his jaw and arm and disconnected, our electricity, all in one whack.” Station didn’t get on the air until 9 o’clock that morning. New V Stations In Lap of Courts; Litigations Start Washington, Dec. 27. Whether any new VHF stations will get started in UHF cities un¬ til the termination of the current FCC allocation proceedings is ex¬ pected to be determined soon by U. S. Court of Appeals action on three cases now before it. The court has received motions for temporary injunctions to re¬ strain the Commission from going through with recent VHF grants in Madison, Wis., and Corpus Christie, Tex. The motions were to be filed today (Tues.) by UHF sta¬ tions WKOW-TV and WMTV in Madison. KVDO-TV in Corpus Christi filed last week. In view of the Court’s recent ac¬ tion in staying the Commission's drop-in of channel 10 in Vail Mills, N. Y., many lawyers here expect (Continued on page 61) Vet 'Invitation’ To Launch New Cycle CBS Radio’s 15-year-old “Invi¬ tation to Leaning” starts a new cycle Jan. 1 with discussion of “Victorian Reappraisals,” covering the work of 13 writers of that era. Under helm of Dr. Lyman Bryson, who’s been with the show since its launching, and with two guests each week, the books to be dissected are Walter Bagehot’s “Physics and Politics,” “Trillope’s “Barchester Towers,” Browning’s poetry, Macaulay’s “Essays,” Dick¬ ens' "Great Expectations,” John Morley’s “Life of Gladstone,” Ten¬ nyson’s “Idylls of the King,” Thackeray’s “Pendennis,” William Morris’ “News from Nowhere,” Ruskin’s “Modern Painters,” Wilde’s "Importance of Being Earnest,” George Eliot’s “Adam Bede” and George Saintsbury’s “Nineteenth-Century Literature.” Ralph Backlund produces for CBS 1 Public Affairs. * In the most intensive program ever, launched to promote color tv, NBC-TV moves to the Coast after the first of year. Net’s color mobile unit will be stationed here for first half of 1956, to be moved to where- . ever a location is staked out by program v.p. Fred Wile and pro¬ duction director Tom Sarnoff. Wile and Sarnoff are spearheading a campaign for fuller recognition of the Far West, both indoors and out, as natural subjects for color ca¬ meras. (Until this move, only color re¬ mote unit on Coast yvas that of •KTLA (TV), Hollywood, indie Par¬ amount Pictures subsid, which sta¬ tion manager Klaus Landsberg built around a moving van.) One of first experiments will be the testing of local NBC mono¬ chrome studios for colorcasting, without substantial architectural changes. Objective is to make available the net’s many ordinary telecasting studios here for color- casting. Presently, only Burbank’s Color City originates chrbmatic shows. ^ Outdoor events will come under the immediate scrutiny of Wile and Sarnoff for next year’s colorcasts. First on color agenda will be Tour¬ nament of Roses parade, Jan. .2, first colorcasted by web in 1954, but skipped Jan. 1, 1955. Two huge (Continued on page 61) WOR Drops Oat Of Vidkid Battle WOR-TV is .cutting out of the heavy N.Y, competition for juve viewership at 6 p.m. by dropping its Wgtime kid standard, “Merry Mailman.” They’re taking the mail¬ man’s sack off Ray Heatherton and are dressing him instead in a tux to sing to adults and to emcee around a batch of 12^-minute vid- film yarns, many of which Fireside Theatre” produced when video wa* in its infancy. At present only : WCBS-TV pitches to adults at suppertime with news, etc., while the other five Gotham stations are fighting hard for kids. New 6-to-6:25 stanza, “Ray Heatherton Theatre,” starts Jan. 9. WOR reports the rating services show only a third of; the city’s tv sets are in use at that time, mostly kid audience, hence leaving plenty of room to increase sets-in-use with a second adult telecast? Heatherton (who’ll keep doing “MM” in its WOR-TV noon slot since, conversely “most of the. competing- programs are for adults”) will utilize the station’s live orch in a closing ditty for grownups. Until now only after¬ noon Ted Steele show has used live music. WOR was losing out in the 6 p.m. kiddie battle and sees a chance to get a smoother transition from Steele’s “Teen Bandstand” to the Gene Autry-Roy Rogers pix, which it says, have many adults watching. Producer Sandy Howard segues from old show to new one on Jan. 9.