Advertising: Making the Image

• Share

Hubert Humphrey's campaign staffers recently witnessed an advertising presentation that shocked them. As proposed for a minute-long TV spot, it featured Humphrey's countenance superimposed on a dart board. While an off-screen voice solemnly ticked off Hubert's achievements ("first to come out for open housing . . . first for disarmament . . . first for aid to education"), darts went winging in on the vice-presidential face to drive each point home.

To Manhattan's Doyle Dane Bernbach, which had been working on the Humphrey campaign since last May, the dartboard pitch had real impact. To the Humphrey people, it seemed more like subliminal sabotage. DDB dutifully went back to its storyboards, but not for long. Democratic Campaign Manager Larry O'Brien fired DDB, abruptly dumping the shop whose wry, whimsical ad techniques (Avis, Volkswagen) had worked so well for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Humphrey's people called in Campaign Planners, a group formed largely of staffers from Lennen & Newell, the nation's 14th largest agency.

High Stakes. With only six weeks remaining before the voters go to the polls, the Democratic dustup leaves Campaign Planners pretty much last in the presidential image-making race. DDB had had a chance to air only a few commercials. The new Humphrey-Muskie group, which will run its first TV ad this week—fully a month after Chicago—faces competition that is already in high gear.

The Nixon-Agnew teams of Fuller & Smith & Ross (annual billings: $60 million) and Feeley & Wheeler ($6,000,000) have been prepping for the G.O.P. campaign since February. Even Third Party Candidate George Wallace has a long leg up. Birmingham's Luckie and Forney, which handled Lurleen Wallace's 1964 statehouse campaign, has worked up two 30-minute TV shows.

Though agencies often take on campaign work as much out of political conviction as for profit, the stakes are higher this year than ever before. National and local candidates will spend something like $50 million on radio and television advertising, compared with $34.5 million in 1964. Most of that will go for TV time, and even the networks are becoming defensive about the cost. Lately, they have been passing the word that candidates can get discounts of up to 50% on standard rates, which can run as high as $70,000 for a minute of prime time. There is only one catch: the networks are demanding full payment in cash 24 hours before air time.

Everyone is trying to wring a bigger return from the tube. NBC sold nearly a dozen one-minute World Series spots to Nixon and Humphrey (at $40,000 per), only to run into the objections of Baseball Commissioner William Eckert, who complained that the fans should not be distracted by national issues during the national game. At week's end, Eckert decided to play ball. After all, officials of the Olympics, that bastion of amateurism, did not quibble when Nixon's camp bought some $500,000 worth of TV time to be aired during the Mexico City games.