Advertising: Making the Image

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.

Not every appearance costs money, however. Last week, Fuller & Smith & Ross ran a one-minute, $26,000 Nixon spot during the top-rated Rowan and Martin Laugh-In show, but the boss got on the show itself for free. Popping up during a slapstick sequence, the new Nixon mugged on camera long enough to cry, with mock incredulity, “Sock it to meeee?” Nixon was recruited for the scene, which was actually filmed before the Miami convention by Laugh-In Co-Producer Paul Keyes, an old Nixon friend who now promises equal time for the other candidates.

For the Boondocks. In handling their political accounts, which will run an estimated $7,000,000 for Nixon and some what less for Humphrey, the agencies work themselves into the sort of lather usually reserved for a Procter & Gamble account. To gear up quickly for a big-money proposition that, win or lose, will end after Election Day, they have taken to borrowing talent from other shops. Most agencies are prepared to handle chores far beyond the preparing and placing of ads. Feeley & Wheeler has designed enough buttons, bumper stickers, Nixon dresses and oddments to fill an 18-page catalogue, can get carloads of hoopla out to the boondocks within 24 hours after an order.

So far, the copy, like the candidates, has come nowhere near the controversial pitch of 1964. Then a monumental flap arose over DDB’s Johnson-Humphrey ads, including one that used a child licking an ice-cream cone to link the danger of strontium-90 to Goldwater’s stand on atomic testing. Fuller & Smith & Ross, by contrast, has pretty much stuck to careful excerpts from Nixon’s Miami acceptance for TV and radio fare. And about all the agency has dared to do with “Nixon’s the One,” a slogan originated by Nixon headquarters, is develop a few cautious variations like “This Time, Nixon.”

Hoping to catch up, Humphrey’s Campaign Planners aims to expand its slim, six-member Washington-based staff, which was originally created to do volunteer work for Citizens for Humphrey. The head of the group, Lennen & Newell Senior Vice President Barry J. Nova, 35, has had no campaign advertising experience. He is currently on leave from his agency, where he handles Muriel Cigars.