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Commercials: The Spoilers

5 minute read
TIME

It is one of the newest cigarette commercials on TV, but it looks as old as the George Washington Hills. A Marlboro-type man is seen puffing happily in a duck blind. Cut. The sound track plays Smoke Gets in Your Eyes while a Winston kind of couple revels in a shipboard romance. Cut. A Salem-style twosome, high on tobacco and each other, enjoy an apres-ski spree. How can such a splice-up of burnt-out cliches sell cigarettes? That’s the point. The voiceover during the 60-second spot has been saying right along: “Cigarette smoke contains some interesting elements: carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, benzopyrene, hydrogen cyanide. Cigarette smoke has been related to increased rates of lung cancer, coronary heart disease, peptic ulcers and emphysema.” And so on.

The sponsor is the American Cancer Society. The commercial represents what might be called the new “spoiler” genre of public-service messages that are stirring the TV air and, at times, the American conscience. Urban America Inc has a commercial showing a ghetto child who calls, “Here, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty. Nice kitty.” The camera discovers a rat. Voiceover: “If your child mistook a rat for a cat, how would you feel? Our cities need help, your help. If you think there’s nothing you can do to help, think harder.”

Sickening Collision. A water-pollution spot uses the background sound ( a flushing toilet to dramatize the condition of many U.S. rivers and streams; an antilitter campaign depicts a community overrun by snorting pigs. In the “Give a Damn” campaign for the New York Urban Coalition, a black narrator suggests to white viewers: “Send your kid to a ghetto for the summer. Want to see the pool? C’mon. The kids clog up the sewer with garbage, open a hydrant . . . You don’t want your kids to play here this summer? Then don’t expect ours to.”

And by now almost every viewer has been jolted by the National Safety Council ad showing a couple tooling down a highway. An announcer’s voice says “Guess who Sid and Gladys ran into day before yesterday?” There is silence, then the sickening sound of a collision followed by the return of the voice with the answer: “Hank and Marilyn.” Even Smokey the Bear is growling nowadays: his fire-prevention spots feature footage of charred woodlands.

Hipper Pitches. The new tough sell has little problem finding air time. The Federal Communications Commission requires TV stations to carry free public-service spots in accordance with “the needs of the community.” In compliance with the FCC “fairness doctrine,” broadcasters run a one-minute antismoking commercial for every three regular cigarette ads. While there have been some complaints that the stations bury the public-service pitches in off-hour, low-audience periods, it is generally true that the more sophisticated and zingier ads get the best slots.

With commercials becoming hipper by the week, public-service producers can no longer get by with just putting the camera in the living room of a star who enters, smiles warmly and chirps something like: “Hello, I’m Jane Wyman, and I want to talk to you about the March of Dimes.” Richard Diehl, vice president of the Needham, Harper & Steers agency, which handles the National Safety Council campaign, finds that “television stations can pick and choose, and if the spot isn’t outstanding creatively, it won’t run.” The public-service efforts, Diehl adds, are a key part of the “creative competition” on Madison Avenue. The noncommercial commercials are often included in the “presentation reels” with which agencies solicit new business.

Hotter Writers. Most of these accounts are divided among agencies by the industrywide Advertising Council.* The work is done not by trainees but by the hottest guys in the shop, for there are a lot of incentives. The client” is likely to be grateful rather than meddlesome. Copywriter and cameraman often welcome the chance to stop creating paeans to the fantasy life, and deal instead with serious problems.

Stars also eagerly participate—even though they may have to work without credit. Jose Ferrer provides the narration for some of the traffic-safety spots. Melvyn Douglas is the indignant Urban America Inc. spokesman exhorting whites to “think harder.” Alexander Scourby, the highest-priced voiceover man in the business, handles the Peace Corps recruiting pitches without his customary royalties.

There are no easy ways to measure the effectiveness of many of the public-service ads. Who can say how many acres of timberland Smokey the Bear has preserved, or to what degree the Urban America-type messages have reduced racism in the country? But the best of these spots undoubtedly do produce a lingering response in viewers. The U.S. Public Health Service reported last month that cigarette consumption had dropped 1.4 billion (from 572 6 billion) in the 1967-68 fiscal year, and that 21 million Americans kicked the habit. The American Cancer Society’s spoiler commercials can probably take some credit for that.

* One exception: The antismoking campaign, which the council rejected as “special interest.” Since the tobacco industry is the n lion’s fifth largest TV advertiser ($232 million last year), the old, established agencies have avoided the Cancer Society account. 1 was taken over by Lord, Geller, Federico & Partners, a one-year-old Manhattan firm trying to make a nationwide name for itself.

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