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...

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