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Saturday Jungle. While a TV series films an average of ten minutes worth of script in one day, the shooting of a 60-second commercial often takes two or three days and can run through 25,000 ft. of film to get the final, worthy 90 ft. For an ad introducing Mattel Toys' new Bathhouse Brass line, a film crew covered 1,000 miles to shoot in eight different locations. The spot shows a parade of kids cavorting across sand dunes and careering down slides while madly blasting away on their plastic "brassoons," "toobas" and "floogle-horns." A kind of psychedelic version of the Pied Piper, the ad is typical of the wild, hyped-up pitches aired in the "Saturday morning jungle."
Except for time and expense, few if any campaigns can match the series of Shell ads that were an endurance test in more ways than one. To demonstrate Platformate, Shell's "extra mileage ingredient," the Ogilvy & Mather agency set up an endurance contest between cars containing Shell gasoline with their Platformate additive, and others without. Then they filmed the cars as they raced across the Bonneville salt flats; the Platformate cars always won. The films were two years in the making and cost an estimated $300,000. Even so, one ad in the series had to be junked. Some Negro viewers, led by Comedian Dick Gregory, complained that the film showing five white Platformate cars outdistancing five black cars was a demeaning insult. Nowadays, Shell is phasing out its endurance-test ads and, like most of its competitors, is running coupon contests on TV.
Pupil Response. Admen go to extraordinary lengths in trying to determine whether the result of all their effort is effective or not. Prior to launching a commercial, agencies screen it before test audiences and run a series of checks and quintuple checks that are as elaborate as those for a space shot. Lie detectors, word association, sentence completion and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory are among a few of the methods used. Foote, Cone & Belding lugs rearview projectors to homes to get verdicts. Kenyon & Eckhardt plays TAG (Target Attitudinal Group), a method of extensive indirect questioning.
Leo Burnett's Creative Research Workshop uses the "galvanic skin-response test," which measures the perspiration level and thus interest of volunteers through electrodes clamped to their hands. Another device is the "pupillary-response camera." It records the dilations of the viewer's pupils as he watches a test commercial. If the subject likes what he sees, his pupils widen; if not, he can catch a little nap time.
Yet for all the probings and brain-candling, TV ads fail with reassuring regularity reassuring because it means that the masses are still beyond manipulation. Indeed, owing to what the researchers call "the fluid, ever-changing force of subcultures," the viewers are still downright unpredictable.