Mating on Madison Avenue

Spooning ice cream as she sailed, Actress Carol Channing relaxed one day last week in the middle of the Hudson River, ensconced aboard a 38-ft. yacht named Dolly after the Broadway show in which she stars. An idle summer day's cruise? Not at all. Cameras whirred from a nearby boat, making sure to catch the brand of the yacht (Bertram) and of the ice cream (Dolly Madison) as well as Miss Channing's wide-eyed face. Carol Channing was hard at work on a device that is becoming one of the most popular in the advertising world: the tie-in ad, a mating of two or more products in a single display. Used last year by more than 400 companies, tie-ins have brought together such disparate products as RCA Victor and Schenley whiskies, Hathaway shirts and Air India, Remington Arms shotguns and Stetson hats. United Air Lines is so eager to tie that it is setting up a special budget for the purpose, will listen to any proposals short of liquor and lingerie.

Tact & Patience. Tie-ins started on a small scale years ago as modest ads matching two products with an obvious affinity, but they have now bloomed into big ad and promotion campaigns that bring together as many as a dozen sponsors. Small companies are excited by the bigger, splashier space they can buy by pooling their ad money with other small firms, also like the occasional opportunity to be paired with a famous brand name. Tie-in promotional material is usually given more and better space in stores and show windows, is liked even by large corporations that can easily afford solo advertising. United's men-only Caravelle flights got additional thrust from Caravelle suits by Hart, Schaffner & Marx and Caravelle golf carts by a Chicago manufacturer. Ford's Mustang was introduced with ties to everything from toy cars to Mustang sunglasses by Renauld.

Knotting together a tie-in demands a lot of tact and patience, and few ad agencies care to go to all that trouble. As a result, the field has been taken over by specialists. The biggest and busiest is Manhattan's Leonard Fellman, 47, whose 17-man agency serves 20 companies on a regular basis (including Du Pont, BOAC, National Car Rental and Holiday Inns) and does work for 300 other companies a year. Most of the ads are placed in magazines and newspapers, but this week Fellman is starting a TV department as well.

Persuasion Trouble. Fellman considers himself a kind of marriage broker. "You have to be a diplomat, banker, mother and pacifist," he says. He has paired Aldon nylon carpets with a Chrysler Corp. M-60 tank (to demonstrate durability). Eastern 727 Whisper-jets and Du Pont fabrics, Muriel cigars and mink coats--and Carol Channing and her boat and bounty. Fellman insists that finding a theme to carry a tie-in is only part of his problem. The real trouble comes in persuading a brace of sponsors to accept an idea, and figuring out how much each should pay for sharing in it. In the Remington-Stetson marriage, for example, two-thirds of the $12,000 campaign was billed to Stetson, which is getting twice as much touting in the tie.

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