The TV Pitchmen

Sometimes the message comes from a waddling polar bear, sometimes from a skating penguin, a magic rabbit or a talking dog. Sometimes it comes in a display of hurtling rockets, spinning alphabets or galaxies of exploding stars. If the pitch is entrusted to a human, there is always the smile -- broad, ecstatic, spreading from one side of the screen to the other as it expresses satisfaction over a cigarette, a glass of beer, a bright new refrigerator.

Compared with radio, which in a quarter-century of broadcasting never got beyond the singing commercial, TV has been a precocious prodigy. Barely into its fourth big year, it has already developed a dozen different ways of huckstering its products and dizzying its audience.

Slides & Flaps. TV commercials started, timidly enough, with an announcer borrowed from radio reading a sales message into a microphone. Quickly gaining assurance, admen branched out with visual demonstrations, optical slides, flap cards -- selling methods that are still used, particularly on daytime TV. Then came the filmmakers, bringing with them animated cartoons by Walt Disney alumni, products that marched, skipped and jumped, filmed dramas cast with professional actors whose job it was to sell soap, automobiles, hand lotions and floor coverings.

In the trade, these techniques are known as animation, stop motion and live action. Now most sponsors demand all three at once. "They want every technique used in a Hollywood film packed into a one-minute commercial," complains Film-Maker Robert Lawrence of Jerry Fairbanks, Inc. "It makes it tough for us and sometimes leaves televiewers bug-eyed." But sponsors' enthusiasm for filmed commercials has resulted in an $8,000,000-a-year business for Manhattan alone. More than, 300 filmmakers, many of them operating on shoestrings, are scrambling for a share of the new jackpot.

Drill & Dance. One casualty of the boom is probably the most memorable of the early filmed commercials. The famed close-order drill of Lucky Strike cigarettes so hypnotized viewers that they are now being eased off television. Explains an agency executive: "No one ever paid any attention to what we were saying, they just watched the cigarettes. Those marching cigarettes were so successful that they weren't successful; they were so good, they were no good."

But admiring admen agree that Lucky Strike has come back with a stellar replacement: a repertory company of 23 people dedicated to making "live" commercials for Lucky Strike TV shows three times a week. Complete with singers, dancers (they have their own choreographer) and, often, a full orchestra, the stock company endlessly plugs Lucky Strikes with all the verve of a musical comedy.

Since admen are as follow-the-leader on TV as they have always been in radio, many other TV commercials are likely to assume a musical comedy format. But, sooner or later, something different will come along. As one ecstatic adman put it, with unconscious irony: "Why, we haven't even scratched the surface of what we can do to please the public."

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