The Business of America
McCall, David B.
The Business of America - "Freedom to Advertise" Lindley H. Clark Jr., the economic news editor of the Wall Street Journal, initiated this column with four essays...
...Let Dalton Trumbe, Donald Freed, and Mark Lane show you, courtesy of Burt Lancaster, Will Geer, Robert Ryan (as the heavies), old news footage, constructed news footage, and Loe Harvey Who...
...But experience tells me it certainly is the black, the Puerto Rican, the Mexican-American, and the white who has made the all-American error of being poor...
...Incomparably the finest treatment of the great European folk migration to the U.S...
...Defending Liberalism" Bennett Patterson points out that truth-in-lending alone is supervised by the FTC, the FRB, the ICC, the CAB, the Agriculture Department, the FDIC, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Bureau of Federal Credit Union, and the Comptroller of the Currency...
...Neither has Woody, thanks be...
...You didn't know...
...A puff for prison reform, at the very least, and guess which man named D*LT*N TR*MB* is involved again . . . . _9 Sleeper: Woody Allen's back, superlatively wacky, in a tale of 200 years hence...
...I believe I have read almost every word that Mr...
...popular with rednecks North and South...
...One for the zanies only...
...9 Papillon: Oh, 13 million bucks, give or take a million, to chart French safecracker Henri Charri~re's many escapes from imprisonment in French Guyana...
...Harvard will survive this trifle...
...I think they forced the advertising business into light-years of progress in television commercials in their decision that everything shown on a television screen or on a magazine page should be what it is purported to be...
...And the power of advertising has never been so dented as by The Alternative March 1974 27 the whole smoking controversy...
...But what of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the railroads...
...Men like Charles Yost and Edwin Etherington have been precisely the sort of people who have given cre= dence to the job of self-regulation...
...This is true, true and true again in the world of marketing...
...5. Sometimes when I look into the flinty eyes of the reformers, I wonder if they would not be more comfortable in a world without perfume...
...this one is full of it...
...But I will certainly join any crusade to stop the outrageous economic brutalizing of the nation's poor...
...the lions had always pulled large and enthusiastic crowds...
...The mortality rate for new products is more than 50 percent, as reported by A.C...
...Woe to the businessman so arrogant that he does not listen to his customers...
...I submit that this piece of product information has...
...As Senator Sam Ervin, a solon I would rather follow than the Kingfish, said: "Government cannot be trusted to honor the commandments of the First Amendment...
...It is also hard to believe that a competing airline industry would have made some of the buying decisions that have murdered their profitability in the past few years...
...Speaking of the FTC, its efforts have been noble in intent but sometimes highly ignoble in procedure...
...The fifth myth is that a supergovernment bureau for consumer protection would be of aid and benefit to the consumer...
...Penney and Scars are the monoliths of the retail business and growing by leaps and bounds...
...And they love Holiday Inns, no matter how ugly they may be...
...Who forced Detroit to make over half of its cars nice, small, economical ones...
...In the midst of rampant inflation, the average family has to pay taxes, provide shelter, buy food, buy drugs, send children to school and college, provide medical care, buy insurance, provide transportation, clothe and amuse themselves from this sum of money...
...The second myth is the notion that the role of advertising should be restricted to the delivery of objective product information...
...I cannot find my senses raging at the fact that there is sugar coating on the cereal of a little boy in Lake Forest...
...We are continuing this series now by publishing essays discussing the American condition from the perspective of individual businessmen...
...They are coming from competitors whose own ox is being gored, either in fact or in the opinion of the complainant...
...Of these, 175 were dismissed, 110 were upheld, and 186 were administratively closed...
...The Civil Aeronautics Board may prove in time to do as much harm to the consumer's best interests in the air transportation world...
...But what did happen is almost more interesting...
...To impair the freedom of speech in advertising might have farreaching consequences indeed...
...Here are a couple of facts...
...Norman Cousins, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Gloria Steinem, Jacqueline Wexler, and David Who...
...My subject is the freedom to advertise and the price of government restrictions...
...It is no accident that J:C...
...We ran eight full pages in an insert on offshore drilling and every page was read better than any other advertisement in the magazine...
...In 1972 the median family-income in the United States was $11,116...
...Not to mention Edsel, or the entire effort to keep American families in great big cars when they didn't want to be...
...Nielsen...
...It is still true that "corporations make the finest political enemies in the world" as none other than Huey Long said many years ago...
...The fifth is the notion that a supergovernment bureau overseeing advertising -would protect and aid the consumer...
...Fashion...
...One could conjecture that there are not many abuses of the truth made' in national advertising...
...If it is to the best interests of the United States, and I believe it is, to have many centers of power, advertising is essential...
...The third is the profound belief that advertising is all-powerful and that once business makes up its mind to sell a product or an idea and unleashes the force of advertising, it never fails...
...Strangely enough, most of the consumer groups seem most active in defending the middle-class and upper-class consumers, who need their help least...
...And usually for the same reason...
...Next up: how the Klan framed Sirhan so that the Minutemen could kill Bobby Kennedy...
...The one-liners are side-splitting, quite so, and the sight-gags are Ke.atonesque...
...As the old saw goes, you can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think...
...When Vance Packard said that there was something called subliminal advertising, the reformers believed every unsubstantiated word of it...
...In general, the courts have adopted and applied a First Amendment theory distinguishing between ~commercial' speech and other speech on the basis of an asserted difference in the social purpose and value of these types of speech...
...A French connection worth making...
...Consumers are brought into a discussion of a product category, and they air their views...
...Dear sweet bird of youth, I thought...
...If Government at any level ever assumes the authority to prohibit absolutely the advertisement of perfectly legal products, if it ever assumes the role of final arbiter as to what is truth-in-advertising, if it develops the power to dictate to the people what they should buy and for what reason, then not only will the dissemination and exchange of economic ideas be dead, but freedom in all its many facets will soon disappear from our land...
...We have had enough evidence in the last year that concentration of power is a very real temptation to evil in Washington...
...Not one of the many new cigarettes that have been introduced since the television ban has achieved as much as one-half of one percent of the market...
...9 The Exorcist: William Peter Blatty's compelling novel screened magnificently...
...The ICC has set rail rates and protected the public from the abuses of railroads since 1887...
...Our agency does the corporate advertising for Exxon, and we have found because the public told us so--that the very best way to gain understanding for the oil business and its various complex problems is to tell all---every fact that is germane about offshore drilling, supertankers, the energy crisis, and so forth...
...Our joyless friends can do without perfume, but can they do without the hot dog...
...It is worthless if the dogs don't like the product, service, or idea...
...Advertising is effective when it is put behind a product, service, or idea that people want...
...Competition and innovation were dealt a crippling blow...
...Their views are listened to with profound care because they often lead the manufacturer to an idea he would not have had on his own--and always they guide the manufacturer as to what the parameters of acceptability are...
...This is no mean feat, and I submit that it is only the most sublime snobbery that could lead one to the conclusion that families that manage to live within this median income are a bunch of simpleminded suckers who cannot make rational choices without the help of consumer groups and the government...
...The fourth is that self-policing by the advertising business is worthless...
...No near-term profit is worth the long-term tarnishing of their reputations...
...And most of the companies who are national advertisers have a huge stake in the future reputation of their company names...
...Who has built Holiday Inns into a national institution because they provided clean, pleasant, cheap accommodations where none had existed before...
...The soup companies have been particularly active in trying to get women to buy dried soups...
...There have been other factors, to be sure, but the consumer now has virtually no rail service to be served by and what it has isn't all that cheap...
...a violent picture that workS, more's the pity...
...28 The Alternative March 1974...
...Ellen Burstyn as the mother, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller as the exorcising priests, Linda Blair as daughter Regan and the devil himself...
...9 The New Land: Conclusion to Jan Troel's two-part epic, following 1972's The Emigrants...
...little to do with what a woman wants to know about perfume and might even prove counterproductive to her understanding of Chanel No...
...I felt like a plump Medici princeling being asked to debate Savonarola...
...Much perfume is made, as you know, with a base of ambergris which is the morbid excretion in the alimentary canal of the sperm whale...
...The Business of America by David B. McCall "Freedom to Advertise" Lindley H. Clark Jr., the economic news editor of the Wall Street Journal, initiated this column with four essays discussing the practice of business in America...
...As Tom Dillon of BBDO pointed out at exhaustive length, the almost unbelievable unfairness of the way it goes about its business is all too provable...
...But it seems to me that the National Advertising Review Board has been set up with great care and has performed its job with diligence and rectitude...
...Then Campbell, which makes few mistakes, did the same with Red Kettle Soupmixes with spectacular lack of success...
...Who waited until color television brought its price below $500 before buying...
...9 Last Tango in Paris: Threatens to endure as long as Nixon...
...But along comes Helmut Berger, a Younger Man, and by the time hubby arrives and lets on that new face or old, Liz is out, and the audience has concluded that there must be an easier way...
...9 "Walking Tall: Reissued and going strong, this tale of a Southern sheriff cleaning out the evil ones feeds on the American bloodlust...
...The first is the Myth of the Defenseless Consumer...
...A man can peddle his faith and his politics with only minimal Government restrictions, but he cannot peddle his goods and services, however much enrichment they may bring to his fellow citizens, without considerable Government regulation...
...After all, I was against the war, active in the civil rights movement, Voted for McGovern...
...The FTC has done splendid work here and there...
...Perfume...
...But what on earth should make us think that a superconsumer protection agency would act with fairness and justice...
...It seems a drab and dreary world indeed by comparison to the outside universe...
...But the starting point of their philosophy requires a leap of faith, unsubstantiated by any research or documentation whatsoever, that makes Christian Science look easy...
...In a state-controlled economy or in a monopoly situation, it is of far less significance...
...Let's be careful before we legislate restrictions on freedom of speech for advertisers...
...One of the disappointments to the consnmer advocates is how few complaints there have been about national advertising...
...9 The Sting: Newman and Redford together again as lovable con men outwitting the baddies, looking smashing in 1930s duds...
...It is a subsidized industry and all too dependent on the federal gove.,~rnent to think much of the consumer and his or her best interests...
...Why should I disagree with good old Ralph Nader...
...Who pays higher prices for food...
...The Securities and Exchange Commission is the classic example of the regulatory body that has worked for the benefit of the public and of the business it oversees...
...Because they have been mercifully removed from the realities of the marketplace, and we cannot escape knowledge so easily...
...The fact is, as any marketer knows all too well, that the American family, and particularly the American housewife, is a very canny buyer indeed...
...In 1969, before cigarettes were attacked via antismoking ads or forbidden to advertise on television, per capita consumption of cigarettes was 3,993 per year...
...The third myth that afflicts our reformers is that advertising is all-powerflll...
...Elizabeth Taylor is old, old old old and her husband, Henry Fonda, is hot for young stuff, so Liz goes to a Swiss beauty farm and has the complete job...
...New product introduction is a channel sown with more shoals than Ulysses ever imagined...
...after which, Hollywood's version of the great Birch conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King...
...If she bought for her family the way that the United States government buys for the Defense Department, her budget would be in the same shape that the national budget is~-and that condition is not allowed by our lending institutions...
...And then I began to read...
...The dogs have to like it or no amount of advertising will make them d o s o . Now sometimes the dogs like something that the consumer advocates and other social Critics don't want them to like...
...The airing of tens of millions of dollars worth of antismoking commercials had no effect that can be measured...
...But I do suggest that the expression of ideas in advertising is a vital part of the total system of free expression of thought which the First Amendment was designed to protect...
...In the experience of advertising and marketing people, the consumer is a very sharp, very opinionated, very tough customer...
...Any student of government regulatory bodies has a right to some skepticism in this matter...
...Lazy television producers constantly told us in the bad old days that you couldn't photograph coffee or this or that...
...After all, at this moment,: you are listening to the man who wrote the advertising for Rinso Soap, which, backed by five million dollars, did absolutely nothing to convince American women that soap was better than detergents...
...they haven't changed a bit...
...In fact, all advertising is advocacy, an attempt to persuade the consumer that the product or service or idea being set forth is a good one, if not a superior one...
...Humorless, endless, but with moments of Dustin Hoffman as Louis, who saves the film hither and yon from Steve McQueen as Papillon (Charri~re...
...The fourth myth is that self-policing by the advertising business is worthless...
...VVv . . . . . 7 - - pected and the consumer allows for this natural bias...
...ADIES AND GENTLEMEN, honored guests: You have every right to wonder what a nice, anonymous boy like me is doing on a program like this...
...In 1971, consumption grew to 4,039 per capita per year without the benefit of television advertising and in 1972 held at that level with 4,040...
...And there is an interesting trend among the complaints that the Division does receive: An ever-increasifig percentage of them do not come from consumers or from consumer advocate groups...
...It's terribly public, you know...
...9 Jonathan Livingston Seagull: Watch out for the droppings...
...Who built the Volkswagen business in this country...
...This leap of faith has been called the Myth of the Defenseless Consumer by Stephen Greyser of the Harvard Business School, and I will try to discuss it in its various aspects in the course of this afternoon's talk...
...The dogs don't like it...
...And yet there is no relationship between objective product facts and the cut of a Dior dress or the color of a Revlon lipstick...
...Diane Keaton is on hand to help Woody escape from the cops, circa 2173...
...Freedom of speech as it affects advertising may be more important than it seems---because it is...
...My first inkling that I would be placed in an adversary role with Ralph Nader came when I received my schedule of the meeting from the Magazine Publishers Association, containing the dread note, "from 4:15 to 4:25 David McCall and Ralph Nader, with Jacqueline Wexler refereeing a direct exchange between them: 10 minutes...
...Who pays exorbitant interestsrates...
...You might just kill one of America's genuine cultural contributions with enough product inf0rma~ion about the homely hot dog...
...This one is so superior to most scare-em-uppers that the genre must henceforth revise its canons and take off from this...
...as the patsy...
...Overnight, ways were found after the FTC decision...
...And often that's right...
...In 1970, what has been called the year of the most sweeping attack ever mounted against a large scale commercial entity, per capita consumption was 3,985-a drop of eight cigarettes per capita per year...
...received by the National Advertising Division of the Bett~er Business Bureaus...
...As of July 31, 1973, a total of 563 complaints had been...
...Here are some fascinating facts...
...She checks the food pages on Thursday with the greatest care...
...DuPont developed Corfam as a replacement for shoe leather and spent tens of millions of dollars in an utterly unsuc, cessful attempt to persuade people that Corfam was good for them...
...It happens that the presentation of a lot of factual information is a very powerful selling vehicle indeed...
...What...
...But I think I know why I am here...
...First, Knorr spent million after million on this worthy project...
...The removal of cigarette advertising from television did not affect smoking volume...
...9 Executive Action: As everyone knows, the rightwing killed JFK...
...In the development of new products, one of the absolutely vital starting points is the focused group-interview...
...And her husband is no dummy either...
...Who gets clipped, gulled, gypped, double-crossed, bilked, swindled, victimized, hoodwinked, and generally screwed to the wall...
...In a nation of two hundred million people, the right to advertise is, I believe, essential to a business system based on competition...
...When one of my children commented that people must really be excited about listening to me when he heard that this meeting had been moved from Alice Tully Hall to Carnegie Hall, my wife mordantly commented that the Christians vs...
...The naming of companies and products in press releases when not one iota of evidence has been passed upon by the FTC is scandalous, and if you think that's all, read Mr...
...The poor find few champions and it is in the economic ghettoes of our country, urban and rural, that the Defenseless Consumer can be found...
...Think of it...
...Time after time, the manufactttrer goes to market with what seems a swell idea and invariably backed by large sums for advertising...
...I have to confess that I had many reservations about the effectiveness of self-policing myself when it was first proposed...
...But there are product categories and advertising problems that are not best solved by reams of product information...
...Hot dogs...
...and if the film is less than first-rate, at least the costumes, cars, and props recall an era well...
...He or she would consider it to be pretty foolish behavior for a manufacturer not to put his best foot forward in an advertisement or commercial...
...The series attempted to bring to our readers' attention some of the problems inherent in doing business in America today...
...The dogs like Big Macs...
...The Rolls-Royce advertisements of his time, and to this very day, provide the consumer with a veritable torrent of facts about that noble car...
...And yet what does it profit a man to know how many pig snouts are resting in the bosom of his beloved frank...
...It is ex26 The Alternative March 1974 _9 Ash Wednesday: A hymn of praise to the art of plastic surgery, face- and breastlift variety...
...Let me try to explain what I mean...
...All-powerful it ain't...
...in the nineteenth century...
...The consumer understands that advertising is advocacy...
...The more you tell, the more you sell, Ogilvy preached to me...
...And there are plenty who want to...
...It is hard to believe that a railroad industry left to set its Own rates and make its own competitive decisions could have done worse by the American public...
...Dillon's carefully documented speech...
...Too much of the joy of the world would fly out of the window that dreary day...
...But, much to my surprise, they are not going to make it in the research department either...
...She knows to the penny what Safeway, the A&P, and Piggly-Wiggly are charging for Maxwell House Coffee this week...
...The consumerists, tn their earnest way, are far more true believers in adver tising.than its practitioners...
...The consumer groups don't care to believe it, but it is far more often true that the consumer leads the manufacturer to the development of a new product or service than the manufacturer forces a product or a service down an unwilling public's throat by dint of advertising or any other marketing technique...
...But let's be very careful about protecting every one's freedom of speech, including that of the corporations...
...Mary "Next Issue" Comin In A-r l: Y_Y / Reviews of Buckley, Gilder, Kenner, and White And Featuring Harvey Man field, Jr...
...The second is the notion that the role of advertisingshould be restricted to the delivery of objective product information...
...The prof gets all the best lines...
...Her only baggage is a twelveyear-old mulatto son, illegitimate, and a kid, ditto, on the way, but sailors' dreams never die, e r g o . . . _9 Day for Night: Truffaut's song to the cinema, an intricate, yet easy ramble through the ironies of movie-making within the well-made flick...
...A must-see, but read the book first for a double treat...
...I do not believe it is the average consumer whom the consumer groups are mobilizing...
...The occasional factual errors and half-truths are bad enough...
...It is clear what did not happen...
...Then I wondered what I would find to debate with Ralph Nader...
...at the heart of an economic system which has served most of its citizens pretty well...
...There are a number of threads that weave their way through the arguments of the well-intentioned people who wish to restrict freedom of speech in advertising, and I will discuss each one in turn...
...She has made cut-rate drugstores a national institution...
...It's like Seven Snow Whites and the Dwarf...
...If it were true, why isn't there one recorded example of a marketer using it...
...They like to drink...
...They must be victims of olfactory fatigue never to have stood in a room when a woman walked in wafting the perfumes of Araby and rendering normal males happily senseless, even if the perfume did rest on a base of the morbid excretion in the al'imentary canal of the sperm whale...
...Each essay will be written by a businessman unless otherwise stated...
...9 Cinderella Liberty: James Caan as a sailor with heart of gold, ready to undertake the regeneration trip with a chippie an officer refers to as a champagne-cocktail-sipping-teasing, dance-hall tart, or somesuch...
...Never underestimate the power of dreck in Hollywood hands...
...Cosmetics...
...9 The Paper Chase: SO that's what it's like at Harvard Law...
...Let's examine the Myth of the Defenseless Consumer...
...Another stunning performance by yon Sydow, liberated from Ingraar Bergman at last...
...I grew up at Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather where David Ogilvy presented more facts more artfully than anyone before or since...
...Who gets gouged on rent...
...They are not going to make it in the copy department, I have concluded...
...I do not propose a sweeping rejection of all the regulations governing and restrictions on advertising which various levels of Government have imposed...
...If you take a walk in Warsaw--ar at Bob Jones University in South Carolina for that matter--you can get a look at men and women who live in a world without fashion and without cosmetics...
...Let's be careful before we restrict the freedom of advertising speech to a recitation of objective product facts...
...Nader and/or his Raiders have spoken about advertising and marketing...
...If an airline wishes to provide transportation at a lower price to the consumer, it may not do it...
...Of course, there are plenty of government watchdog organizations as it is...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
