Better Woo Buick

The most popular man along Madison Avenue last week was a tough-talking executive named Edward T. Ragsdale, general manager of General Motors' Buick Motor Division. From morn till night, he was discussed, watched, wooed with every honeyed promise that resourceful admen could muster. Agencies besieged his Flint, Mich, office with telephone calls, then had their influential friends call, finally got their friends' friends to call. Reason for the furor: tucked away in Ragsdale's pocket was Buick's fat $24 million-a-year account, the industry's third largest automotive account (after Ford and Chevrolet) and he was preparing to toss it in the lap of some lucky agency.

Only a few days before Christmas, Ragsdale plucked the Buick plum from the hands of the Kudner Agency, which had held it tightly for 22 years. Kudner took on Buick when it was selling fewer than 100,000 cars a year, helped lift it into third place in 1954 (513,497 sales) with breezy, fun-stressing ads and such catchy slogans as "Better Buy Buick," "Hot? It's a Fireball," and the most famous auto slogan of all: "When better cars are built, Buick will build them."

In Kudner's hands Buick became the car for fast, aggressive comers--a category in which every man recognized himself--instead of just a stodgy chariot for doctors and politicians. To meet the new appeal, Buick broadened its line to compete with more expensive cars. The Buick account was the nucleus of Kudner's business--nearly a third of its $66.2 million in billings--and the feeling grew that Kudner could do no wrong in Buick's eyes.

Down for the Count. Kudner ran into trouble with TV, which it started using to plug Buick in 1952. It showed a knack for buying top TV shows at the height of their drawing power--just before they began to wane. Buick's big-league TV advertising suffered from the failures of Milton Berle, Joe E. Brown, Jackie Gleason. Kudner topped off its poor TV performance last August, when a closing Buick commercial was injected into the Floyd Patterson-Hurricane Jackson bout just as the referee stopped the fight and before Patterson could be declared winner. After complaints from hundreds of watchers, Ragsdale, himself a boxing fan, apologized for "the inept handling and bad timing of the commercial."

Far more serious than Kudner's bout with TV were declining Buick sales, which dropped from 737,879 in 1955, the division's biggest year, to 332,102 for the first ten months of 1957, well behind Plymouth. While Buick dealers complained about Kudner's "unchanging" advertising and its lack of contact with dealers, they also felt that the biggest reason behind Buick's slump was its lackluster styling.

Up on the Block. After the cancellation, Kudner announced a shift in its top command. President J.H.S. Ellis, 64. a personal friend of Ragsdale and G.M. President Harlow Curtice and the man responsible for some of Buick's most successful ads and slogans, gave most of his management responsibilities to a new team. One big problem facing the new management: holding on to the other G.M. accounts (Frigidaire, Fisher Body, G.M. corporate), which together make up some 40% of remaining billings.

To replace Kudner, G.M. clearly needs a big agency, but its choice is limited to agencies that do not already have auto accounts (although the prornise Of Buick would sorely tempt many agencies to resign smaller auto accounts). At week's end the contenders apparently had been narrowed to Manhattan's Benton & Bowles Inc. and Compton, Lennen & Jewell and Chicago's Leo Burnett. But it looked as if Buick would wait a few weeks before making up its mind.

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