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But when it comes to out-Heroding Herod, nothing can match the great millimeter mania. It is not enough that cigarette ads, which seem to be one endless round of jingle-jangle whoop-de-do by a babbling brook or out there in Marlboro Country, are among the more mindless on TV.* Now they are engaged in a dreary interior dialogue. In reply to Chesterfield's joshing boast that its 101s are "a silly millimeter longer," Winston Super Kings scoff: "It's not how long you make it." Right, says Pall Mall 100s. What counts is whether you're "longer at both ends." Going everybody one less, Player's cigarettes is currently marketing a new brand in Canada that is "five millimeters shorter" than regular size, which means that "you smoke a little less, you pay a little less." If that doesn't make it, there is always Armour Bacon Longs, which are "a couple millimeters bigger" because they "shrink a little less." Sighing, the Camel filters man shows an 18-inch-long cigarette and wonders, "Where will it all end?"
Yellow Menace. Not, it is hoped, with victory for the ugh plugs, which fall under the heading of the Dreadful Ds: drugs, dentifrices, deodorants, detergents and dandruff removers. They all deal in intensively competitive products, and their problem is the kind of problems they treat. Stuffed sinuses, after all, are not exactly a popular subject, but that does not stop the admen from hawking some nasal spray as if it were the greatest breakthrough since the Salk vaccine.
Strategies vary, but basic to every Dreadful D campaign is the oldest device of all: crisis-making. Thus by sheer repetition, the hawkers suggest that the primary cause of air pollution is bad breath and that the real yellow menace is not Red China but stained teeth. And judging by Katy Winters' early-warning nose, half the nation needs to be told an Ice Blue Secret.
If the Dreadfuls seem to be deliberately outrageous, it is because they are. The gimmick game is called "brand recall," and the ground rules dictate that the only ads that anybody remembers are the very good and the very bad. Pretty good does not count. Quick: Which airline promotes its baggage service by shipping its pitchman in a crate with his head sticking out? Everybody remembers greasy kid stuff, but what stuff is supposed to be superior? Which TV manufacturer, to prove that all its money has been poured into developing a better set, shows its board of directors in their undershirts? If a viewer can unhesitatingly answer Braniff, Vitalis and Sylvania, then he is watching too much TV.
According to one school of thought (which is not to be encouraged), people may buy certain kinds of products even though they hate the commercial. The axiom drawn from all this is that contempt breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds sales. The recently retired White Knight (for Ajax cleanser) was the most ridiculed horseman since Don Quixote. He galloped so many laps around the plains of suburbia 1,000,000 in five years that after a while, he became a rather endearing symbol of camp. What is more, according to one claim, his magic lance added a not-so-subliminal phallic meaning.