TELEVISION: Diet for Commercials

In TV advertising ethics, the border between old-fashioned puffery and outright deception is sometimes ill-defined. For a while admen debated on what side of the boundary belonged the blatant ads for a weight remover named Regimen (sample spot: “Lose six pounds in three days—ten pounds in a week—or your money back!”). Regimen’s hard-driving maker, Drug Research Corp.. helped them to decide. It anted up more than $1,500,000 for TV ads last year (and also spent $443,028 on newspaper ads, $189,837 on magazine ads in 1958).

The Federal Trade Commission was harder to sway. Last May it ordered Drug Research to stop claiming that Regimen could cause the loss of a predetermined number of pounds. After the FTC order, CBS carried Regimen spots for 13 weeks last spring and summer, then shed them. NBC continued them, mostly on Dave Garroway’s Today show. But last week, 17 months after the FTC had complained that “those taking [Regimen] cannot lose weight without dieting,” New York County District Attorney Frank Hogan seized a truckload of Regimen TV film commercials, books and financial records to determine if the ads were “false and misleading.” NBC reluctantly went on a diet, forthwith decided to cut out all Regimen commercials.