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With commercials becoming hipper by the week, public-service producers can no longer get by with just putting the camera in the living room of a star who enters, smiles warmly and chirps something like: "Hello, I'm Jane Wyman, and I want to talk to you about the March of Dimes." Richard Diehl, vice president of the Needham, Harper & Steers agency, which handles the National Safety Council campaign, finds that "television stations can pick and choose, and if the spot isn't outstanding creatively, it won't run." The public-service efforts, Diehl adds, are a key part of the "creative competition" on Madison Avenue. The noncommercial commercials are often included in the "presentation reels" with which agencies solicit new business.
Hotter Writers. Most of these accounts are divided among agencies by the industrywide Advertising Council.* The work is done not by trainees but by the hottest guys in the shop, for there are a lot of incentives. The client" is likely to be grateful rather than meddlesome. Copywriter and cameraman often welcome the chance to stop creating paeans to the fantasy life, and deal instead with serious problems.
Stars also eagerly participate—even though they may have to work without credit. Jose Ferrer provides the narration for some of the traffic-safety spots. Melvyn Douglas is the indignant Urban America Inc. spokesman exhorting whites to "think harder." Alexander Scourby, the highest-priced voiceover man in the business, handles the Peace Corps recruiting pitches without his customary royalties.
There are no easy ways to measure the effectiveness of many of the public-service ads. Who can say how many acres of timberland Smokey the Bear has preserved, or to what degree the Urban America-type messages have reduced racism in the country? But the best of these spots undoubtedly do produce a lingering response in viewers. The U.S. Public Health Service reported last month that cigarette consumption had dropped 1.4 billion (from 572 6 billion) in the 1967-68 fiscal year, and that 21 million Americans kicked the habit. The American Cancer Society's spoiler commercials can probably take some credit for that.
* One exception: The antismoking campaign, which the council rejected as "special interest." Since the tobacco industry is the n lion's fifth largest TV advertiser ($232 million last year), the old, established agencies have avoided the Cancer Society account. 1 was taken over by Lord, Geller, Federico & Partners, a one-year-old Manhattan firm trying to make a nationwide name for itself.