Advertising: The Mammoth Mirror

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Oil in the Champagne Glass. According to their differing philosophies—and the product involved—admen appeal to vastly disparate human emotions: snobbery ("If they run out of Lowenbrau . . . order champagne''), the confusions of parenthood ("How Sears helps your daughter choose her first bra"), nostalgia ("Our beer is 50 years behind the times"), hypochondria ("Take Geritol to end tired blood"), and the competitiveness of childhood ("Every boy wants a Remco toy"). Inevitably, the most heavily used selling themes turn on three aspects of existence that particularly fascinate Americans: youth, sex and romance. Pepsi-Cola, once typed in the public mind as a sweet, cheap drink ("Twice as much for a nickel, too'',), almost certainly owes much of its upsurge of recent years to being recast as the product "for those who think young.'' Marlboro cigarettes, which had previously sold mainly to women, broadened their appeal when tattooed he-men began to puff them in the pages of the nation's magazines. (This kept the women loyal, attracted the men. and sent Marlboro sales soaring 120% in a single year.) And the TV puppets that depict a girl chasing a boy who has just dabbed Brylcreem on his hair (two girls if he uses two dabs) helped to lift that hair tonic from fourth to first place in the market in less than three years.

As Americans grow more sophisticated, however, the admen are turning to subtler appeals. Board Chairman David Ogilvy of Manhattan's Ogilvy, Benson & Mather plumps for detail-packed text ("How Super Shell's 9 ingredients give cars top performance." "25 facts you should know about KLM") on the grounds that today's customer is hungry for facts. In apparent proof of Ogilvy's contention, U.S. sales of Rolls-Royce cars doubled within three years after Ogilvy started running ads, with 21 paragraphs of text, under the headline: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock."**

The newest variant of the appeal to sophistication is that made by needle-sharp President William Bernbach of Manhattan's Doyle Dane Bernbach, who has wowed the ad industry with his grain-of-salt Volkswagen ads playing up qualities that would normally be considered shortcomings ("Think small"). Though some admen still stubbornly insist that "humor doesn't sell," the evidence is that nowadays it does. The major factor in making Duluth's Chun King Corp. a nationally known enterprise has been the zany commercials for the company's prepared Chinese food written by Hollywood's Stan Freberg and yodeled by the "Chun Kingston Trio."