Soapbox v. Couch

Do radio commercials leave you nauseated? Does the unctuous-voiced announcer make your gorge rise? Are you growing allergic to sponsors?

Critics of radio commercials will be pleased to learn that these questions haunt no less a person than six-foot, greying Howard S. Meighan, 42, who is a CBS vice president. A huckster of 21 years standing, Meighan charged this week in the trade sheet Variety that radio's basic flaw is "the insincerity of language and manner used in the average . . . commercial."

Meighan has railed for years against the "inefficiency of insincerity." Last fall he got a chance to prove his theories at CBS-owned WCCO in Minneapolis. Meighan picked WCCO for experiment because its listening audience represents a happy medium between "salesman-shy" New Yorkers and "gullible-as-hell" Californians.

He had secret recordings made of each WCCO announcer's readings of commercials. When the records were played back to the hangdog announcers, most of them admitted that they sounded terrible. One announcer pleaded that he had had to read the same old commercials for 2 1/2 years and that he was as bored as his audience. Most announcers, Meighan says, "fail to comprehend the informality of listening. They are up on a soapbox while the audience is flopped on,a couch."

As a model for his CBS staff, Meighan cites Arthur Godfrey as typifying "the magic approach that has the brightness that comes with freshness and sincerity. People trust him, know he wouldn't pull anything on them." It is inaccurate to accuse Godfrey of kidding his sponsors: "He is, in fact, enthusiastic about them."

Meighan is not at all frightened by the thought that a whole new crop of folksy announcers, all dropping their final g's, might be as unbearable as the current school of insincere supersalesmen. "On the contrary," Meighan says briskly. "That would be the millennium."

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