Advertising: They'd Rather Switch than Fight

• Share

If there is one brand of poison that an advertising man supposedly fears more than a wet martini, it is an account on the rocks. Actually, Madison Avenue has had to learn to live with both occupational hazards. During the past year clients switched no fewer than 290 accounts from one agency to another.

Just completing a wholesale reshuffle is General Foods, after Procter & Gamble and General Motors the nation's third biggest advertiser, with billings last year of $111 million. Within the month General Foods has fired one of its four agencies outright (Foote, Cone & Belding), stripped a major account from another (Benton & Bowles), and rejiggered product assignments between the remaining two (Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy & Mather). In the process, General Foods showered $17.5 million in new accounts on two of the hottest agencies in the business: 13th-ranking Doyle Dane Bernbach, whose sophisticated soft sell for Volkswagen and inverted hard sell for Avis has spawned a school of imitators, and 18th-place Grey, whose strong suit is marketing. Since last September Doyle Dane has received new billings worth $35 million from U.S. Rubber, Mobil Oil, Gillette, Ocean Spray, Bankers Trust—and only last week another $6,000,000 to $8,000,000 from Lever Bros. For the chief casualty, Foote, Cone & Belding, the switch meant the loss of more than $12 million in billings for such products as JellO, S.O.S. scouring pads and Kool-Aid. Outwardly, executives managed to keep their cool, if not their Kool-Aid; playing the never-ending game of Madison Avenue statistics, they pointed out that between 1959 and 1964, sixth-ranked Foote, Cone picked up more domestic business than any other of the ten biggest agencies, last year brought its total billings to $225 million with the addition of $20 million in new accounts.

In the long run, the reason behind the General Foods shift should be of greater concern to Foote, Cone—and to the advertising business—than the specific loss of billings. The reason Foote, Cone was fired, explains Arthur E. Larkin Jr., General Foods executive vice president, was "an unavoidable difference on basic policy in respect to product conflict." Translated, this meant that Foote, Cone had recently taken on Ralston Purina and Hills Bros, coffee, both fiercely competitive with General Foods products. Although auto companies, cigarette manufacturers and soapmakers have long forbidden their agencies to handle other products in the same field, food advertisers have been traditionally lenient. Now that the biggest has decided on a stricter policy, others are likely to follow.