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...
...If an airline wishes to provide transportation at a lower price to the consumer, it may not do it...
...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...
...Neither has Woody, thanks be...
...Who has built Holiday Inns into a national institution because they provided clean, pleasant, cheap accommodations where none had existed before...
...Freedom of speech as it affects advertising may be more important than it seems---because it is...
...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...
...But what did happen is almost more interesting...
...Because they have been mercifully removed from the realities of the marketplace, and we cannot escape knowledge so easily...
...The third myth that afflicts our reformers is that advertising is all-powerflll...
...The dogs don't like it...
...I do not believe it is the average consumer whom the consumer groups are mobilizing...
...9 The Sting: Newman and Redford together again as lovable con men outwitting the baddies, looking smashing in 1930s duds...
...Who built the Volkswagen business in this country...
...You might just kill one of America's genuine cultural contributions with enough product inf0rma~ion about the homely hot dog...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Incomparably the finest treatment of the great European folk migration to the U.S...
...Too much of the joy of the world would fly out of the window that dreary day...
...This is true, true and true again in the world of marketing...
...In the experience of advertising and marketing people, the consumer is a very sharp, very opinionated, very tough customer...
...Speaking of the FTC, its efforts have been noble in intent but sometimes highly ignoble in procedure...
...Competition and innovation were dealt a crippling blow...
...Norman Cousins, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Gloria Steinem, Jacqueline Wexler, and David Who...
...Lazy television producers constantly told us in the bad old days that you couldn't photograph coffee or this or that...
...I believe I have read almost every word that Mr...
...It seems a drab and dreary world indeed by comparison to the outside universe...
...Let me try to explain what I mean...
...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...
...Let's be careful before we restrict the freedom of advertising speech to a recitation of objective product facts...
...I have to confess that I had many reservations about the effectiveness of self-policing myself when it was first proposed...
...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...
...Penney and Scars are the monoliths of the retail business and growing by leaps and bounds...
...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...
...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...
...I do not propose a sweeping rejection of all the regulations governing and restrictions on advertising which various levels of Government have imposed...
...Fashion...
...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...
...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 the power of advertising has never been so dented as by The Alternative March 1974 27 the whole smoking controversy...
...New product introduction is a channel sown with more shoals than Ulysses ever imagined...
...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...
...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...
...And they love Holiday Inns, no matter how ugly they may be...
...The mortality rate for new products is more than 50 percent, as reported by A.C...
...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...
...Each essay will be written by a businessman unless otherwise stated...
...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...
...Who gets gouged on rent...
...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...
...We are continuing this series now by publishing essays discussing the American condition from the perspective of individual businessmen...
...My subject is the freedom to advertise and the price of government restrictions...
...And her husband is no dummy either...
...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...
...Mary "Next Issue" Comin In A-r l: Y_Y / Reviews of Buckley, Gilder, Kenner, and White And Featuring Harvey Man field, Jr...
...I felt like a plump Medici princeling being asked to debate Savonarola...
...The consumer understands that advertising is advocacy...
...It is no accident that J:C...
...As the old saw goes, you can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think...
...But there are product categories and advertising problems that are not best solved by reams of product information...
...Perfume...
...Woe to the businessman so arrogant that he does not listen to his customers...
...If it were true, why isn't there one recorded example of a marketer using it...
...Another stunning performance by yon Sydow, liberated from Ingraar Bergman at last...
...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...
...Think of it...
...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...
...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...
...Nielsen...
...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...
...The fourth myth is that self-policing by the advertising business is worthless...
...Ellen Burstyn as the mother, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller as the exorcising priests, Linda Blair as daughter Regan and the devil himself...
...The dogs like Big Macs...
...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...
...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...
...Time after time, the manufactttrer goes to market with what seems a swell idea and invariably backed by large sums for advertising...
...The removal of cigarette advertising from television did not affect smoking volume...
...Not to mention Edsel, or the entire effort to keep American families in great big cars when they didn't want to be...
...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...
...Who waited until color television brought its price below $500 before buying...
...Let's examine the Myth of the Defenseless Consumer...
...in the nineteenth century...
...Of course, there are plenty of government watchdog organizations as it is...
...9 Jonathan Livingston Seagull: Watch out for the droppings...
...In the development of new products, one of the absolutely vital starting points is the focused group-interview...
...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 fifth is the notion that a supergovernment bureau overseeing advertising -would protect and aid the consumer...
...And often that's right...
...It is clear what did not happen...
...A French connection worth making...
...Diane Keaton is on hand to help Woody escape from the cops, circa 2173...
...VVv . . . . . 7 - - pected and the consumer allows for this natural bias...
...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...
...they haven't changed a bit...
...9 Last Tango in Paris: Threatens to endure as long as Nixon...
...Who gets clipped, gulled, gypped, double-crossed, bilked, swindled, victimized, hoodwinked, and generally screwed to the wall...
...They are coming from competitors whose own ox is being gored, either in fact or in the opinion of the complainant...
...One for the zanies only...
...The first is the Myth of the Defenseless Consumer...
...One could conjecture that there are not many abuses of the truth made' in national advertising...
...It's like Seven Snow Whites and the Dwarf...
...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...
...Here are some fascinating facts...
...Who pays higher prices for food...
...after which, Hollywood's version of the great Birch conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King...
...Dear sweet bird of youth, I thought...
...And then I began to read...
...The occasional factual errors and half-truths are bad enough...
...The soup companies have been particularly active in trying to get women to buy dried soups...
...The series attempted to bring to our readers' attention some of the problems inherent in doing business in America today...
...I cannot find my senses raging at the fact that there is sugar coating on the cereal of a little boy in Lake Forest...
...No near-term profit is worth the long-term tarnishing of their reputations...
...I submit that this piece of product information has...
...Dillon's carefully documented speech...
...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...
...the lions had always pulled large and enthusiastic crowds...
...Let's be careful before we legislate restrictions on freedom of speech for advertisers...
...And usually for the same reason...
...9 Executive Action: As everyone knows, the rightwing killed JFK...
...She has made cut-rate drugstores a national institution...
...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...
...But let's be very careful about protecting every one's freedom of speech, including that of the corporations...
...Hot dogs...
...The Civil Aeronautics Board may prove in time to do as much harm to the consumer's best interests in the air transportation world...
...They like to drink...
...The FTC has done splendid work here and there...
...And most of the companies who are national advertisers have a huge stake in the future reputation of their company names...
...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 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...
...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...
...They are not going to make it in the copy department, I have concluded...
...9 The New Land: Conclusion to Jan Troel's two-part epic, following 1972's The Emigrants...
...But what on earth should make us think that a superconsumer protection agency would act with fairness and justice...
...In a state-controlled economy or in a monopoly situation, it is of far less significance...
...Our joyless friends can do without perfume, but can they do without the hot dog...
...Then I wondered what I would find to debate with Ralph Nader...
...When Vance Packard said that there was something called subliminal advertising, the reformers believed every unsubstantiated word of it...
...9 The Exorcist: William Peter Blatty's compelling novel screened magnificently...
...The prof gets all the best lines...
...First, Knorr spent million after million on this worthy project...
...In a nation of two hundred million people, the right to advertise is, I believe, essential to a business system based on competition...
...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...
...Advertising is effective when it is put behind a product, service, or idea that people want...
...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...
...Consumers are brought into a discussion of a product category, and they air their views...
...Of these, 175 were dismissed, 110 were upheld, and 186 were administratively closed...
...And there are plenty who want to...
...She checks the food pages on Thursday with the greatest care...
...It is ex26 The Alternative March 1974 _9 Ash Wednesday: A hymn of praise to the art of plastic surgery, face- and breastlift variety...
...The more you tell, the more you sell, Ogilvy preached to me...
...One of the disappointments to the consnmer advocates is how few complaints there have been about national advertising...
...popular with rednecks North and South...
...The one-liners are side-splitting, quite so, and the sight-gags are Ke.atonesque...
...We have had enough evidence in the last year that concentration of power is a very real temptation to evil in Washington...
...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...
...The airing of tens of millions of dollars worth of antismoking commercials had no effect that can be measured...
...As of July 31, 1973, a total of 563 complaints had been...
...as the patsy...
...The second is the notion that the role of advertisingshould be restricted to the delivery of objective product information...
...received by the National Advertising Division of the Bett~er Business Bureaus...
...This one is so superior to most scare-em-uppers that the genre must henceforth revise its canons and take off from this...
...It's terribly public, you know...
...this one is full of it...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Any student of government regulatory bodies has a right to some skepticism in this matter...
...9 "Walking Tall: Reissued and going strong, this tale of a Southern sheriff cleaning out the evil ones feeds on the American bloodlust...
...Harvard will survive this trifle...
...and if the film is less than first-rate, at least the costumes, cars, and props recall an era well...
...a violent picture that workS, more's the pity...
...A must-see, but read the book first for a double treat...
...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...
...I grew up at Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather where David Ogilvy presented more facts more artfully than anyone before or since...
...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...
...28 The Alternative March 1974...
...Next up: how the Klan framed Sirhan so that the Minutemen could kill Bobby Kennedy...
...What...
...After all, I was against the war, active in the civil rights movement, Voted for McGovern...
...You didn't know...
...And yet there is no relationship between objective product facts and the cut of a Dior dress or the color of a Revlon lipstick...
...It is worthless if the dogs don't like the product, service, or idea...
...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...
...But I think I know why I am here...
...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...
...9 The Paper Chase: SO that's what it's like at Harvard Law...
...But, much to my surprise, they are not going to make it in the research department either...
...It happens that the presentation of a lot of factual information is a very powerful selling vehicle indeed...
...But what of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the railroads...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...She knows to the penny what Safeway, the A&P, and Piggly-Wiggly are charging for Maxwell House Coffee this week...
...Who forced Detroit to make over half of its cars nice, small, economical ones...
...Cosmetics...
...Then Campbell, which makes few mistakes, did the same with Red Kettle Soupmixes with spectacular lack of success...
...Never underestimate the power of dreck in Hollywood hands...
...The second myth is the notion that the role of advertising should be restricted to the delivery of objective product information...
...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...
...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...
...Why should I disagree with good old Ralph Nader...
...It is still true that "corporations make the finest political enemies in the world" as none other than Huey Long said many years ago...
...But I will certainly join any crusade to stop the outrageous economic brutalizing of the nation's poor...
...To impair the freedom of speech in advertising might have farreaching consequences indeed...
...The ICC has set rail rates and protected the public from the abuses of railroads since 1887...
...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...
...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...
...The fifth myth is that a supergovernment bureau for consumer protection would be of aid and benefit to the consumer...
...Here are a couple of facts...
...little to do with what a woman wants to know about perfume and might even prove counterproductive to her understanding of Chanel No...
...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...
...Nader and/or his Raiders have spoken about advertising and marketing...
...And yet what does it profit a man to know how many pig snouts are resting in the bosom of his beloved frank...
...Overnight, ways were found after the FTC decision...
...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...
...Who pays exorbitant interestsrates...
...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...
...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 consumerists, tn their earnest way, are far more true believers in adver tising.than its practitioners...
...at the heart of an economic system which has served most of its citizens pretty well...
...We ran eight full pages in an insert on offshore drilling and every page was read better than any other advertisement in the magazine...
...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...
...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...
...In 1972 the median family-income in the United States was $11,116...
...All-powerful it ain't...
...The fourth is that self-policing by the advertising business is worthless...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
