ADVERTISING: Dollars for Doughnuts

In 38 years on the stage, Funnyman Joe Cook has thought up some 1,000 implausible inventions of the Rube Goldberg order, never sold one until last week. Then he sold one for $1,000. It was a doughnut-dunking machine (a pulley-and-string contraption) featured in his present Broadway show, It Happens on Ice. Purchaser was Doughnut Corporation of America. The sale was authentic, the money real. For Doughnut Corp., $1,000 for publicity was cheap.

Doughnut Corp. is a near-monopoly of the U. S. doughnut industry. U. S. doughnut sales were estimated at some $78,000,0000 last year (up from $5,000,000 in 1920), and 80% of these doughnuts were made on Doughnut Corp. machines. More than 30% were also made from Doughnut Corp. mix. Its largest factory (in Ellicott City, Md.) operates now 20 hours a day, has some 2,000 employes. Doughnut Corp. is boss of the doughnut world.

For two years this almost anonymous corporation has pushed doughnut sales with one of the screwiest publicity campaigns in advertising history. It founded the National Dunking Association, claims for it more than three million members (including Congressman Jennings Randolph, Mrs. Martin Johnson, Martha Graham); holds dunking contests, gets dunking testimonials from unlikely bigwigs like Novelist Pearl Buck. Said she: “If Mayor LaGuardia and Hitler only would get together and dunk a couple of doughnuts, they would see life through the same rose-colored glasses.” Standing on his head atop Manhattan’s Chanin Building, Flagpole Sitter Shipwreck Kelly ate 13 doughnuts one Friday the 13th.

Last week Doughnut Corp. launched Donut Week with sillier shenanigans than ever. Radiozany Gracie Allen pushed a button setting off doughnut machines all over the country. While Manhattan paid its respects to the usual “Donut Queen,” Camden, Maine honored the late Captain Hanson Crockett Gregory, alleged inventor of the doughnut’s hole,* planned to erect a statue to him. Placing its Joe Cook dunker on view in its Times Square Mayflower Doughnut Shop, Doughnut Corp.

planned 1,000 table-size replicas for restaurant distribution.

Chief beneficiary of all this brouhaha is Doughnut Corp.’s board chairman and controlling stockholder, Adolph Levitt. Operating a chain of bakeries after World War I, Levitt found that Salvation Army lassies had made doughboys doughnut-conscious, that the new market thus created needed a mass-produced doughnut, uniform and digestible. After engineers produced for him an efficient doughnut machine, Pioneer Levitt organized Display Doughnut Machine Corp. (later Doughnut Corp.) to sell it to independent bakers. In 1925 Levitt put out a standardized mix, later supplied patrons with optional trade names (most famous: Downyflake, Mayflower).

As sales soared, so did Doughnut Corp.’s sense of importance. To Doughnut Corp.

men, dunking is not only good promotion but a symbol of democracy, almost a patriotic rite.

Seldom seen, seldom heard. Tycoon Levitt avoids the spotlight, leaves evangelical work to dark, dynamic Alfred L.

Plant, Doughnut Corp.’s sales-promotion manager. Mr. Plant roams through dough-nutdom, conferring with bakers, planning sales campaigns. A friendly press, fond of photographing him measuring doughnut holes with calipers, refers to him as the “Will Hays” of the doughnut industry.

With him works loud, flashy Publicityman Bert Nevins. Says Nevins with simple candor: “Doughnuts lend themselves readily to screwy publicity.”

*Captain Gregory supposedly persuaded his mother to cut out its soggy centre (wherein was a nut).