The Numbers Game

Ever since television first flickered into life, it has attracted an ever-enlarging audience. The number of knob twisters dwarfs the circulation lists of even the largest magazine. In a speech before magazine promotion men at New York's Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Manhattan Adman Fairfax M. Cone (Foote. Cone & Belding) had some blunt words for magazines tempted to play the numbers game against the one-eyed monster of the marketplace. Cone's advice: Don't do it.

Television has its faults as an advertising medium, said Cone. Its aim is indiscriminate and low. But the newcomer also has some distinct virtues as a vendor. "There are certain areas in advertising and selling where the sheer size of its audience, combined with the low cost of reaching it, makes television an almost mandatory medium." Certainly, no other medium can do a better job in peddling kitchen scouring pads--a job that Cone's agency gave to Gertrude (Molly Goldberg) Berg: "Who, except the makers, wants to argue the merits of competitive brands? This is where television's captive audience for advertising pays off ... Television [makes] the difference because it [reaches] so many people and [holds] them long enough to win an argument they didn't know they had the slightest interest in."

Magazines that try to compete with TV's wholesale approach, argued Cone, may be overlooking an important--and distinctive--asset of their own: "the fact of selectivity." Cone learned this fact for himself years ago. as a promotion man in San Francisco, when he managed to secure a copy of TIME'S subscription lists for the city. "I then copied off the names and addresses of every subscriber who was listed on either Vallejo Street or Broadway or Pacific Avenue"--three streets that passed through some of San Francisco's seamier neighborhoods and out into "the city's best residential area." Said Cone: "The result was what you might expect. Practically all the copies of the magazine delivered in these three long, varied streets went into the best section. The inference was easy to draw, that if this was where TIME went in San Francisco, it could hardly go to an altogether different kind of home elsewhere."

Said Cone: "Large numbers tell almost nothing about people. And I want to know about people. I don't want to be told that magazine subscribers don't watch television. What I do want to know is what they read and contemplate--and how well they believe they are served. I want you to tell me who it is I am talking to when I buy your magazines; and what they are like. I want to know this so I can tell my clients."

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