ADVERTISING: Accounts Moved

Last week two advertising agencies lost (and others got) two of the biggest accounts in the U. S. From Philadelphia’s N. W. Ayer & Son, Henry Ford took some $4,000,000 worth of business (all his Ayer advertising except radio), split it between two other agencies. Manhattan’s McCann-Erickson, which already had the motor-maker’s branch and dealer advertising, got the Ford car advertising. To Detroit’s Maxon, Inc., which took over the Lincoln-Zephyr account from Ayer last summer went the Mercury account. For Maxon and McCann, this was good news. For Ayer, it was a serious plucking.

Ayer’s bad news was not the biggest in the agency world last week. Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co., No. 2 U. S. soapmaker (No. 1: Procter & Gamble), which spent well over $6,000,000 last year to sell Palmolive soap and 432 other items, abruptly announced that after Jan. 1 Benton & Bowles would handle C-P-P advertising no more. This bombshell was followed by another: B. & B.’s $1,000,000-a-year Continental Baking Co. account also went into other hands. These losses will cut the agency’s annual billings about in half.

Biggest beneficiary of both B. & B.’s losses was the same: tall, blond, mild Theodore Lewis Bates, B. & B. vice president (until he leaves next month). After he left Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne to join B. & B. in 1935, the Continental account followed him. Last January Adman Bates also took over the Colgate account. Last week there were changes at CPP, of which those at B. & B. were an echo. Advertising Director Roy Peet, with whom Bates worked, moved upstairs to be assistant to President Edward Herman Little. And Adman Bates was given the option of forming his own agency to handle part of the account or of staying on at B. & B. without it. He chose the former. His new agency will handle Palmolive’s two shaving creams, Colgate’s Dental Cream, Kick (soap chips) and Octagon products (soap). It will also have Bates’s old reliable, Continental. The two will give the agency billing of some $3,000,000 a year.

Such fission of one agency into two is common in the advertising business; is in fact the way Bill Benton and Chester Bowles got started in 1929. For Ted Bates, B. & B.sters wished nought but well last week. According to trade talk, the prime reasons for their loss were: 1) the competition of a Chicago agency called Sherman & Marquette, 2) the ruminations of C-P-P’s bright, big-eared executive vice president, James S. Adams.

In originally getting the C-P-P account, Bill Benton and Chester Bowles had the advantage of having been at Yale with S. Bayard Colgate, now chairman of C-P-P’s board. Then Bill Benton retired (with a fortune) in 1937 to become vice president of University of Chicago. Chairman of C-P-P then was old Charles Pearce, whose son-in-law was Stuart Sherman of Chicago. Soon Pearce began throwing pieces of the advertising to his son-in-law’s agency (Sherman & Marquette). Meanwhile, with Bill Benton out, Chester Bowles wrapped up in radio and yachting, and Atherton Hobler (B. & B. president) preoccupied with General Foods, B. & B.’s hold on the Colgate account began to slip. Last January B. & B.’s Executive Vice President Jim Adams, who had handled the account, quit to become executive vice president of CPP. Such a move might have been thought to strengthen B. & B.’s hold on its big client, since Adams knew the agency from the inside. But it didn’t work that way.

In redistributing the account last week, Jim Adams gave part to Ted Bates, part (the juicy Concentrated Super-Suds account) to Sherman & Marquette, the rest (the $1,500,000 Palmolive account) to neither. Still unplaced this week, it was being hotly sought by three or four agencies. Rumored contenders: Arthur Kudner. Inc., Maxon. N. W. Aver.