Navel-Gazing in Wasteland

The story was buried about as deep in the New York Times as a story can get. Bristol-Myers Co., reported Times Columnist Peter Bart on page 66 one morning last week, had switched its $11 million Bufferin account from one ad agency to another. The Bufferin switch was also immured, on the same day and in nearly identical construction, by Columnist Joseph Kaselow of the New York Herald Tribune. Eventually, the Bristol-Myers item made two afternoon Manhattan papers and flashed crosscountry to be interred in those posterior reaches of the daily press where the average reader seldom if ever ventures.

There, amid the grey agate wasteland of the stock tables, dwells one of journalism's newest specialists, the advertising columnist. He stalks a beat so narrow and unnewsworthy that most papers prefer to do without him entirely. Of the handful of such men regularly kept at work in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver, San Francisco and Detroit, only five get a daily airing. And four of these--Bart of the Times, Kaselow of the Tribune, Charles Sievert of the World-Telegram and Jack O'Dwyer of the Journal-American--appear in New York City,*where the Madison Avenue column was born only 30 years ago.

The Dymo Scoop. Why was it born at all? Advertising is a multibillion-dol-lar industry--but that sum measures what advertisers spend, not what Madison Avenue takes home in the form of a 15% commission. The nation's 3,500 ad agencies employ 64,000. But that figure is exceeded by the U.S. population of doctors, lawyers, bankers, pharmacists and bakers--none of whom can claim a single newspaper column devoted to their professional activity.

Moreover, the shoptalk hawked in most advertising columns is about the dreariest in the land. Walter Addiego, who churns out an ad column for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, said recently: "Last week the Dymo company let me make an announcement that they were looking for a new domestic public relations outfit." Stunned and humbled by this scoop, Addiego added: "You can't be that lucky all the time." The headlines induce mostly mystification or slumber: BANKS TO INCREASE USE OF ADVERTISING (Chicago Tribune), PRSA, WRIGHT FIRM AT LOGGERHEADS (Joe Kaselow), WAYNE WELCH INC. WILL OPEN AGAIN (Denver's Rocky Mountain News).

"Total Pain." The dean of ad columnists is the Herald Tribune's Kaselow, 51, who admits: "There's not enough hard news to support a column every day." After twelve years on the Madison Avenue beat, Kaselow nonetheless manages to turn out consistently readable copy. So does the Times's Bart, a graduate of the Wall Street Journal, who took his business savvy with him to the Times. More often, though, the ad columns are pure navel-gazing, a catalogue of account changes and personnel promotions for a tiny fraternity of readers who supply the very items they read. In Philadelphia, 90% of the contents of A. Joseph Newman's ad column in the Bulletin is distilled from handouts, a proportion exceeded by the Boston Herald, where it is 100%.

Among those who manage to resist the ad columns are many top admen: "The columns are generally vapid; why waste the space?" says a Chicago agency vice president. Says David Ogilvy, chairman of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather: "They are a perfect total pain in the bum. Most of the stuff they print shouldn't get into newspapers. If any other business or profession has such columns, I pity it."

*The fifth: George Lazarus of the Chicago Daily News.

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