Advertising: The Mammoth Mirror

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The Enfant Terrible. For Madison Avenue's pros, the task of getting across the client's message is getting harder all the time. The average American is now exposed to 10,000 TV commercials a year. As the number increases, so do the admen's worries about "overexposure." Frets Chicago agency Chief Earle Ludgin: "Customers are getting deaf to advertising. They're able to ignore it and pass it by." Before long, echoes Young & Rubicam President George Gribbin, "the day of the shouter will be gone."

But it is not gone yet. Most admen profess to detect evidence of "increased public consciousness" of advertising—by which they mean more vocal public irritation with strident or tasteless ads. Armed with surveys of "thought leaders" to buttress their point, the majority of admen lay the blame on the newest major force in advertising: television. An ad for a deodorant or a panty girdle seems right at home in a women's magazine; the audience is "selective" and the scanning eye can reject the ad if it wishes. But the TV audiences in the nation's living rooms are "unselective," often mingling parents, children and casual friends, and in such an atmosphere an explicit ad blares out to the embarrassment of all. Says President Norman Strouse of J. Walter Thompson: "It is a simple matter to turn a page, but TV makes it possible for advertisers to impose rudely on the viewer with every unhappy practice of the industry—hard sell, bad taste, driving repetition."

Many admen tend to ascribe much of the responsibility for television's excesses to one source: Manhattan's Ted Bates & Co., which funnels a greater percentage of its business into TV than any other agency (80%), and has rocketed from nowhere in 1940 to fifth place among all U.S. agencies, with billings last year of $163 million. Chief Executive Theodore Lewis Bates, 61, is a shrewd Down-Easter who graduated cum laude from Yale ('24) and is still one of Manhattan's most facile copywriters. But the enfant terrible at Bates is Chairman Rosser Reeves, 52, who propagated the dogma of the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. The rule: find a unique proposition that promises a specific benefit to the customer and will thereby sell The Product. The agency then takes the USP and hammers it home with water-torture repetition—Colgate Dental Cream "Cleans Your Breath While It Cleans Your Teeth," "Wonder Bread Helps Build Strong Bodies 12 Ways." (The Bates people like to observe that 20th Century-Fox may not recoup its $30 million investment in Cleopatra, but that their controversial ''split-level head" television commercial for Anacin cost only $20,000 and raised sales of the pills by a whopping $35 million.)