Advertising: The Mammoth Mirror

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Reeves holds that once he has linked a USP with one of his clients' products, he has no need to worry about the fact that rival products may be able to offer the same "unique" benefit. All toothpastes clean breath as well as teeth but, says Reeves, if a rival were to make such a claim, it would only remind the public of Colgate. Although the Bates agency engages an expensive stable of doctors and scientists to ensure that its claims are "FTC-able." the Federal Trade Commission sometimes takes the fun out of the USP game. It has blown the whistle on Bates for suggesting that Carter's Pills had something to do with the liver (even though Carter had made that claim long before it hired Bates in 1942), for sprinkling drops of water on Blue Bonnet margarine to indicate that it alone delivered "flavor gems," and for pasting sand on plexiglass to demonstrate that Palmolive Rapid Shave could shave "sandpaper."

Battle over Controls. Despite its general concern over the television problem, the ad industry has mixed emotions about this kind of crackdown by the FTC. Most admen profess to see serious, long-range danger in the order that the FTC issued in the Rapid Shave case—a sweeping decree that forbade Colgate and Bates to misrepresent the merits of Rapid Shave "or any other shaving cream," or to use "spurious mockups or demonstrations for any product" on pain of fines up to $5,000 a day. Opponents of the ruling hold that it amounts to an unspecified threat of punishment.

A majority of admen are also disturbed over the FTC's attempt to win greater powers from Congress. As matters now stand, the FTC has to battle its way through the courts to force withdrawal of an ad that it deems untruthful or misleading. (In the Carter case, it took the Government 16 years to get the company to remove the word liver from the name of its pills.) What the FTC wants is authority to issue its own temporary cease-and-desist orders against ads it deems objectionable, pending a court ruling.

This FTC request has been rattling around Washington for years—and is likely to do so for quite a while to come. A vocal minority of admen, however, would like to see it granted. Says Fairfax Cone: "The industry cannot police itself —it never could. The FTC is just reaching for more authority to do what it's supposed to do."

Moving on from questions of truth—which involve only a small minority of today's ads—a few admen even argue that the FTC should be given more power to deal with questions of taste. But to most observers, including many outside the ad industry itself, this seems a highly dubious proposition. To give any official body—appointed or elected—the right to determine what is "good taste" would scarcely jibe with the traditional U.S. view of a free society.