. . . And Now a Word about Commercials

COMMERCIALS are infuriating. They are also irresistible. Commercials are an outrageous nuisance. They are also apt to be better than the programs they interrupt. Commercials are the heavy tribute that the viewer must pay to the sponsor in exchange for often dubious pleasure. They are also an American art form. A minor art form, but the ultimate in mixed media: sight, sound and sell.

Commercials or a great many of them are better than ever. How and why this came about is one of the more fascinating phenomena in television. They are part of the background music, as it were, of the American scene. Hardly anybody pays total attention to them; hardly anybody totally ignores them. Many, the very good and the very bad, force or insinuate themselves into the imagination. Even a reluctant viewer cannot quite resist the euphoria induced by airline ads that waft him up up and away, or travel spots, island-hopping in a wink of quick cuts, that drop him on a sun-splashed beach. Even while grumbling, he marvels at the dexterity, not to say ludicrous imagery, of a white tornado suddenly swirling through an untidy kitchen. He wakes up singing "You can take Salem out of the country, BUT . . ." His kids, riding shotgun on the shopping cart, may not know a stanza of The Star-Spangled Banner, but they can rap out several verses of "To a Smoker, It's a Kent."

With their vast and relentless power of amplification, the writers of commercials sprinkle more tag lines and catch phrases into the conversation than the poets, fettered to their paper and print, can ever hope to put into the American idiom. "A little dab'll do ya," "Fly the friendly skies" and "Leave the driving to us" are in fact a kind of pop poetry.

Commercials also have deeper, more serious impact. In a discussion of the causes of last year's ghetto riots, the Kerner Report suggested that the enticements of TV commercials, "endlessly flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth," were an important inducement to the state of unrest. Opinion Researcher Mervin Field goes so far as to suggest that commercials constitute "a looter's shopping list."

Whether or not that analysis is correct or fair, commercials obviously represent the American materialist vision of the good life all the shiny possessions and luxuries that people want, or are supposed to want.

Conveniently Deaf. TV pushes this vision to an overwhelming degree. Empires have been built on commerce, trade has opened up frontiers, but nothing like the TV sales pitch has ever existed before. Despite the genuine entertainment that so many of the good commercials afford, television still succeeds in crushing its viewers with ads that are too annoying, too loud, too often and just too much. Roughly 20% of TV air time is given over to commercials (see chart, next page). This year 2,000 advertisers will pour $3.1 billion into television advertising twice the budget of the poverty program reaching 95% of the nation's homes. What's more, the TV spieler has a unique license. He doesn't have to stick his foot in the door. He's already in the living room, chattering away from The Farm Hour right through Sermonette. Conveniently deaf, he just smiles and hammers home his quota of 600 "brief messages" a day.

Worse yet, he seems to catch his second breath always at the wrong time. He cuts into the movies just when things are getting interesting, or links three, four or five commercials in a row during the station breaks. Even the war news suddenly comes to an abrupt halt for the sake of sell. The bloody events in Viet Nam, incongruously flanked with sales messages glorifying the good life at home, leave the viewer with the inexplicable sensation that the commercials and the war are one and the same: Which is the more real?

And what are the limits? On the day Robert Kennedy died, Walter Cronkite no sooner wrapped up the latest bulletins on the killing than the screen cut cold to a mouthwash ad. Later, during the funeral, commercials were dropped. The television industry, which devoutly believes in commercials, pays its highest tribute by forgoing them. That is the first grand gesture (the second gesture is a reminder detailing how much money the network relinquished in the public service).

Interplay. The money alone that goes into commercial production is stupefying. Film Director Stanley Kubrick, himself something of a big spender (2001: A Space Odyssey cost $11 million), observed recently that "a feature film made with the same kind of care as a commercial would have to cost $50 million." As it is, the cost of a one-minute commercial rehearsals, filming, reshooting, dubbing, scoring, animation, printing runs to an average of $22,000 or about five times more than a minute of TV entertainment.

For that kind of money, the mini-moviemakers command top talent. Frank Sinatra sells Budweiser beer. Sid Caesar does a comedy routine for Sperry Rand, while Jose Ferrer supplies the voice-over continuity. Edward G. Robinson poured for Maxwell House coffee. Jack Benny promotes Texaco gasoline. George Burns puffs El Producto cigars. Sometimes the process is reversible. Actress Barbara Feldon was a sexy slink of a salesgirl for Top Brass hairdressing ("Sic 'em, tiger") before she went big on legit TV as co-star of Get Smart! Pam Austin, the original Dodge girl, is now a member of the cast of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.

Off the screen, the roster of professionals is equally impressive. Hollywood Cameraman George Folsey, who has been nominated for an Oscar 13 times, now trains his lens on Miller High Life beer and Sanka coffee. Composer Mitch Leigh, who wrote the music for Man of La Mancha, is a top jingle writer for commercials. Dress Designer Bill Blass does the wardrobe for the models who are seen nuzzling up to the Princess telephone.

The men who put it all together, the directors, may one day be hailed as true innovators in film it is they who pack a succinct story into a few seconds and in the process produce many new cinematic ideas. The work of such directors as Michael Cimino for Kodak, Howard Zieff for Benson & Hedges and Mike Elliott for Rheingold, has precipitated an interplay of ideas that flows freely between Madison Avenue and the conventional movie set. The directors dabble with Fellini-like stream-of-consciousness techniques. Hollywood copies TV's fast cuts and odd-angle perspectives. The quality of Richard Lester's movies A Hard Day's Night, Petulia reflects his experience as director of more than 300 commercials.

CEBUS. This refreshing infusion of talent came just in time: the old sock-it-to-'em pitch was making a lot of people punchy. The only way to sell certain analgesics was to make the viewer queasy just watching: faucets dripped acids into the stomach, hammers clanged on anvils in the head. It was getting increasingly difficult to tell whether the little old winemaker was getting tanked on Drano, or pushing Ken-L Ration for hungry Living Bras. Gradually, after 20 years of hard-sell harangue, viewers developed a kind of filter blend up front. They did not turn off their sets; they turned off their minds. Admen refer to that phenomenon as the "fatigue factor," but their research departments know it by the more ominous name of CEBUS (Confirmed Exposure but Unconscious). In one recent survey, 75% of the viewers tested had no recollection of what products they had just seen demonstrated.

These audiences have been joined by the Pepsi generation, which sees but does not believe. Raised on the tube, these young people have heard and seen all the obvious plays on insecurity and are unimpressed by all the weaseling statements that sound impressive but mean nothing. Marshall McLuhan (who else?) has observed that future historians will find in advertising "the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities."

If so, the reflections derived from the old, hard-sell commercials will be rather odd. In the typical American family, Mom is obviously a nut. Every blessed washday, she is seen running around the backyard with wild, passionate abandon, embracing her laundry and squealing, "It even smells clean!" That's more than can be said for Sis. Poor kid, her best friend just told her she's got rotten armpits. As for Dad, he keeps getting punched in the eye because he won't switch his brand of cigarettes. So he asserts his virility by barreling around mountain roads in his wide-track, fastback, four-on-the-floor Belchfire with the racer's edge. And Junior, well, the sudden joy of discovering that he's got 27% fewer cavities has apparently unhinged him. Now he stands in front of the mirror all day and counts his pimples. And after dinner, the whole family gathers at the hearthside, unwraps their Wrigley's and, with a hi ho and a hey hey, chews their little troubles away.

Real People. This kind of pitch, with its view of the consumer as saphead, is still afl too prevalent. But, increasingly, as admen are trying to break through the CEBUS barrier, the old commercial is being replaced with the truly new brand of ad with miracle ingredients some honesty, some humor, packaged with meticulous care. It might be called the uncommercial, and it has transformed the viewer into a consumer of the pitch as much as of the product.

He identifies with the characters who for once look almost like real people fat, scrawny, drab, sassy, ordinary. He is caught up in a Jell-O ad, in which a snatch of conversation and a glimpse of beaming faces around the dinner table capture the mood and moment of a young soldier home on furlough. He is washed in nostalgia as a Kodak spot scans a lifetime by focusing on a greying couple as they rummage through old snapshots. Says Adman David Ogilvy: "The consumer isn't a moron she is your wife." Adwoman Mary Wells, president of Wells, Rich, Greene, sounds the credo of the new uncommercial makers: "You have to talk person to person with people, use people words and people terms. You have to touch them, show humanness and warmth, charm them with funny vignettes. You have to make them feel good about a product so they'll love you."

Lovable Tummy. One of the first breakthroughs in uncommercial making came in 1964 in a new Alka-Seltzer series. For years, "Speedy Alka-Seltzer," the cartoon imp with a tablet for a hat, insulted audiences by pushing the fizz as though he were conducting a Romper Room class. Then the Jack Tinker agency took over the account and decided to try for a touch of wit and realism: a film showing nothing more than a quick succession of people's midriffs being prodded and pushed, or just merrily jouncing along. The message was: "No matter what shape your stomach's in, when it gets out of shape, take Alka-Seltzer." Along Madison Avenue, the film became an instant classic. Among Alka-Seltzer's latest, and best, is the cartoon of a man and his disgruntled but lovable-looking tummy seated in separate chairs, hashing out their troubles before an unseen marriage counselor. It ought to be revolting, but it isn't. The drawing style has some of the wonderful, way-out whimsy of Thurber and the deceptive, squiggly-line bite of Jules Feiffer, while the dialogue is reminiscent of an Elaine May-Mike Nichols routine.

Along with Alka-Seltzer, Volkswagen, Avis, and Chun King chow mein pointed the way. If critics were to categorize commercials in the manner of plays or films (and why not?), they would find a variety of styles and sub-styles. For a start, one can discern:

sbTHEATER OF THE ABSURD. A beautiful girl gets into the back seat of a Rolls-Royce,takes off her clothes and climbs into a bathtub brimming with Calgon bath oil. The Dash soap man butts into conversations and flings laundry at innocent people. "Louise Hexter," he commands, "start wearing cleaner blouses!" The shaming, the touch of half-suppressed hysteria, is unsettling. Another instance of the absurd involves the flamenco dancer who stomps the living daylights out of a Bic ballpoint pen that has been attached to his heel. Here the effect is different. One remembers all the other similar nonsense the pen that writes under water, the watch that survives a trip on the rudder of an ocean liner and one inevitably begins to speculate in grudging fascination about what they might try next.

sbTHEATER OF CRUELTY. To demonstrate a new type of insulating foil, Union Carbide places a baby chicken in a small foil-lined metal box and then lowers it into a beaker of boiling water. Several long moments later, out pops the chick, frisky and unfried. The initial plunge is not exactly Grand Guignol, but it does provide a bit of a shock. A recent spot for American Motors shows a gang of men demolishing a competitor's car with sledge hammers. Who would admit to hating autos? Still, there is a certain undeniable thrill in seeing all that shiny metal crumple.

sbSURREALISM. This is usually mixed with metaphors come to life: the real dove that turns into a bottle of Dove liquid soap, the Ultra Brite girl who brands strangers with long-distance kisses. There is also an element of "I can do anything you can do" worse. Thus when Aerowax ricochets machine-gun bullets off its "jet-age plastic," another brand looses a stampede of elephants to trample over its "protective shield." The surrealistic approach often has a certain childish charm at first, but with repetition it quickly palls.

sbEXISTENTIAL SLAPSTICK. This genre seems to mix Mack Sennett and Samuel Beckett. A woman, responding to the call "Where's the Open Pit?", dashes across the lawn with a bottle of Open Pit barbecue sauce and disappears into an open pit. A baker, having carelessly forgotten his Vicks Cough Silencers, tosses pizza dough into the air, coughs and catches it splat in the face. Splat again, as the Pond's girl gets schlopped in the eye with cold cream. And whack! umph! and aaagh! as a mousy little guy, sploshed with Hai Karate after-shave lotion, brutally chops down a scent-crazed female on the make. Nothing like a little good-natured sadism to punch home a point.

sbFUN SEX. Currently the best example of this type is the ad in which a blonde looks straight through the camera and coos, "Take it off. Take it off. Take it all off!" while the music rips through a bump-and-grind melody. Of course she is really talking to some guy shaving with Noxzema, and she is referring to his beard. At first it seems wrong. Isn't it the man who is supposed to shout: "Take it off"? But in an instant, the reversal of roles becomes rather charming and even sexy, which is more than can be said for shaving. The girl, incidentally, is Gunilla Knutsson, Miss Sweden of 1961, but her heavy accent still sounds like a put-on.

sbLOW SATIRE. Some commercials kid themselves, some razz the production style of various other products. A Jeno's pizza skit kids the halitosis hucksters. Marilyn says: "I'll tell you what your problem is, Gloria. You have bad pizza. Bad pizza!" After Gloria switches to Jeno's, Marilyn tries another tack: "Now I'd like to talk about your deodorant." Gloria: "Marilyn, how would you like a nice belt in the mouth?" A small masterpiece, worthy of Jonathan Winters or the late Ernie Kovacs.

sbHIGH SATIRE. Relatively high, anyhow. Benson & Hedges gets a lot of laughs as it demonstrates the disadvantages of smoking its longer cigarette: a jewel thief hides behind the drapes, but his B & H sticks through and gives him away; a girl writes in to thank B & H for the extra length, since it comes in handy on her job she sticks it in her mouth while a marksman flicks it with his bullwhip.

How Many Millimeters? Good gags, as any adman knows, stick in the mind. And so do successful commercials, so much so that they keep coming back like a bad memory. Shell once got good mileage out of a spot in which a driverless car went rolling off to a Shell station to lap up some gas with TCP. So now Sinclair shows an auto deserting a pair of newlyweds to get a quick belt of KRC. A few years ago, Chevrolet displayed a car atop a spire-like butte in the Mojave Desert. Ah so, said the Toyota people, and right away they airlifted their sedan to the top of Fujiyama. Now in what promises to become the acrophobia sell, there is a new hair-coloring ad showing a girl atop another outcropping in the Colorado high country declaring to the world that "New Dawn sets you free."

But when it comes to out-Heroding Herod, nothing can match the great millimeter mania. It is not enough that cigarette ads, which seem to be one endless round of jingle-jangle whoop-de-do by a babbling brook or out there in Marlboro Country, are among the more mindless on TV.* Now they are engaged in a dreary interior dialogue. In reply to Chesterfield's joshing boast that its 101s are "a silly millimeter longer," Winston Super Kings scoff: "It's not how long you make it." Right, says Pall Mall 100s. What counts is whether you're "longer at both ends." Going everybody one less, Player's cigarettes is currently marketing a new brand in Canada that is "five millimeters shorter" than regular size, which means that "you smoke a little less, you pay a little less." If that doesn't make it, there is always Armour Bacon Longs, which are "a couple millimeters bigger" because they "shrink a little less." Sighing, the Camel filters man shows an 18-inch-long cigarette and wonders, "Where will it all end?"

Yellow Menace. Not, it is hoped, with victory for the ugh plugs, which fall under the heading of the Dreadful Ds: drugs, dentifrices, deodorants, detergents and dandruff removers. They all deal in intensively competitive products, and their problem is the kind of problems they treat. Stuffed sinuses, after all, are not exactly a popular subject, but that does not stop the admen from hawking some nasal spray as if it were the greatest breakthrough since the Salk vaccine.

Strategies vary, but basic to every Dreadful D campaign is the oldest device of all: crisis-making. Thus by sheer repetition, the hawkers suggest that the primary cause of air pollution is bad breath and that the real yellow menace is not Red China but stained teeth. And judging by Katy Winters' early-warning nose, half the nation needs to be told an Ice Blue Secret.

If the Dreadfuls seem to be deliberately outrageous, it is because they are. The gimmick game is called "brand recall," and the ground rules dictate that the only ads that anybody remembers are the very good and the very bad. Pretty good does not count. Quick: Which airline promotes its baggage service by shipping its pitchman in a crate with his head sticking out? Everybody remembers greasy kid stuff, but what stuff is supposed to be superior? Which TV manufacturer, to prove that all its money has been poured into developing a better set, shows its board of directors in their undershirts? If a viewer can unhesitatingly answer Braniff, Vitalis and Sylvania, then he is watching too much TV.

According to one school of thought (which is not to be encouraged), people may buy certain kinds of products even though they hate the commercial. The axiom drawn from all this is that contempt breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds sales. The recently retired White Knight (for Ajax cleanser) was the most ridiculed horseman since Don Quixote. He galloped so many laps around the plains of suburbia 1,000,000 in five years that after a while, he became a rather endearing symbol of camp. What is more, according to one claim, his magic lance added a not-so-subliminal phallic meaning.

Promises, Promises. That particular revelation came during one of the "depth interviews" conducted in the name of motivational research, the way-out wing of advertising in which the Freudian sell is rudimentary. As all admen know, people don't buy products, they buy psychological satisfaction: the promise of beauty, not cosmetics; oral gratification, not cigarettes. Depthwise, baking a cake is supposedly a re- enactment of childbirth and shaving a form of castration. Speed and performance, or a sense of male power, are blatantly stressed in automobile commercials. Cars become wild animals or fish Wildcat, Impala, Cougar, Stingray, Barracuda. When a man slips behind the wheel humming "Only Mustang makes it happen," he, too, becomes a big ripsnorting stud. Ridiculous? Well, whoever heard of a car called the Aardvark or the Pussycat?

Actually, most admen use this sort of motivational psychology the way Roman emperors used auguries or modern politicians use religion: they don't necessarily believe in all that stuff, but they invoke it when it seems useful. Often motivational research merely boils down to an inspired hunch. The elaborate process of commercial making begins in earnest with an agency brainstorming session (see box opposite). Once the slant of a campaign is determined, writers and artists then work up rough drawings of the ads in comic-strip form. Ideally, these "story boards" will have a "hooker opening" or an intriguing scene-setter, plus a memorable catch phrase or two that dramatizes the need, say, for Murine to cure "eye pollution" or for Wizard air freshener to wipe away "house-itosis."

Prestige Sound. The script is then delivered to a production group usually an independent agency. In the casting process, actors are chosen for the "authentic look," Jack Gilford, for instance, seems typecast as the conniving Cracker Jack addict, and Lou Jacobi looks every bit the beleaguered traveling salesman in a Hertz ad. Narrators Ed Herlihy for Kraft Foods and Alexander Scourby for Eastern Air Lines are prized for their ability to project "appetite appeal" and a "prestige sound." Just as important is the preparation of catchy music, which may even become a bestseller on the pop charts, as was the good fortune of Benson & Hedges' Disadvantages of You and Polaroid's Meet the Swinger.

At length, a small army of actors, makeup men, hairdressers, set designers, wardrobe people, technicians and directors head out to make their film, and act out the admen's fantasies. Perhaps they will alight in an ancient West German castle, which was the setting for a recent Volkswagen commercial. Maybe the cameraman will strap himself to the back of a speeding motorcycle or scoot around in an electric wheelchair to achieve new whirling, eye-catching effects.

Saturday Jungle. While a TV series films an average of ten minutes worth of script in one day, the shooting of a 60-second commercial often takes two or three days and can run through 25,000 ft. of film to get the final, worthy 90 ft. For an ad introducing Mattel Toys' new Bathhouse Brass line, a film crew covered 1,000 miles to shoot in eight different locations. The spot shows a parade of kids cavorting across sand dunes and careering down slides while madly blasting away on their plastic "brassoons," "toobas" and "floogle-horns." A kind of psychedelic version of the Pied Piper, the ad is typical of the wild, hyped-up pitches aired in the "Saturday morning jungle."

Except for time and expense, few if any campaigns can match the series of Shell ads that were an endurance test in more ways than one. To demonstrate Platformate, Shell's "extra mileage ingredient," the Ogilvy & Mather agency set up an endurance contest between cars containing Shell gasoline with their Platformate additive, and others without. Then they filmed the cars as they raced across the Bonneville salt flats; the Platformate cars always won. The films were two years in the making and cost an estimated $300,000. Even so, one ad in the series had to be junked. Some Negro viewers, led by Comedian Dick Gregory, complained that the film showing five white Platformate cars outdistancing five black cars was a demeaning insult. Nowadays, Shell is phasing out its endurance-test ads and, like most of its competitors, is running coupon contests on TV.

Pupil Response. Admen go to extraordinary lengths in trying to determine whether the result of all their effort is effective or not. Prior to launching a commercial, agencies screen it before test audiences and run a series of checks and quintuple checks that are as elaborate as those for a space shot. Lie detectors, word association, sentence completion and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory are among a few of the methods used. Foote, Cone & Belding lugs rearview projectors to homes to get verdicts. Kenyon & Eckhardt plays TAG (Target Attitudinal Group), a method of extensive indirect questioning.

Leo Burnett's Creative Research Workshop uses the "galvanic skin-response test," which measures the perspiration level and thus interest of volunteers through electrodes clamped to their hands. Another device is the "pupillary-response camera." It records the dilations of the viewer's pupils as he watches a test commercial. If the subject likes what he sees, his pupils widen; if not, he can catch a little nap time.

Yet for all the probings and brain-candling, TV ads fail with reassuring regularity reassuring because it means that the masses are still beyond manipulation. Indeed, owing to what the researchers call "the fluid, ever-changing force of subcultures," the viewers are still downright unpredictable.

Manhattan's Rheingold beer people learned this when they went after the "ethnic market" with a $300,000 series of beautifully filmed ads, each showing a group of Greeks, Negroes, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Irish or Japanese partying it up with Rheingold. The mock-modest point was that the sponsor really didn't know why his beer was so widely loved, but "We must be doing something right." Wrong. Research later showed that no minority group wanted to drink a beer that could be so popular with other minority groups. As a result, Rheingold switched to a more forceful, if simpleminded, pitch proclaiming the "ten-minute head."

Delivery Service. Despite such evidence of consumer independence, some critics believe that TV commercials, along with all advertising, have a seductive effect upon the population, compelling it to overconsume its own overproduction. Even John Kenneth Galbraith, who has referred to advertising as "organized public bamboozlement," points out that the picture is not quite so simple and that advertising is an inevitable part of the U.S. economy. Harvard Sociologist Chad Gordon observes: "We are a materialistic culture, and material acquisitions came before the first commercial was ever made. Commercials did not create status envy or the desire for increased status" even though they can overstimulate those desires, and many others as well.

The more immediate question is not what commercials do to the economy, but what they do to TV. Obviously, they will not go away much as one would like them to at times. But must they dominate the channels quite as much as they do? Sometimes it appears that all TV fare is one super-commercial, with entertainment simply an extension of the sales pitch. The networks become, in effect, just audience-delivery services. It is not that they are influenced by advertisers they are psyched by them. In a classic episode, Chevrolet once changed the script of a western to read "crossing" instead of "fording" a river.

Such an incident is less likely now than it used to be (a recent Chevy commercial actually mentioned Ford by name). But it still remains indicative of a certain way of thinking by sponsors. With the exception of a few enlightened companies among them Xerox, Hallmark, Bell Telephone and Western Electric most advertisers still prefer to avoid controversial or specialinterest programs, and are happily led to the kind of show that provides the best frame for a sales pitch. Sometimes the frame and the picture merge completely, as when Clairol builds a beauty pageant around its commercials.

What can be done? Chances are that if everyone keeps his fingers crossed and buys the right products, the light-hearted uncommercials will spread and increasingly crowd the ugh-plugs off the air. But that is not enough. Another prospect is that the networks, goaded by viewer resentment, will move closer to the European scheme by having fewer but slightly longer commercial breaks. At present, with 9,000 new items appearing on the supermarket shelves each year, sponsors have started "clustering" cramming more but shorter messages into the same time space. In the past two years alone, the number of products shown on TV has increased by about one-third, most of them in ten, 20-and 30-second shots. There will also be more "piggybacking": promoting two unrelated products in one ad. "Triggerbacking" and "quarterbacking" are just a station break away.

Glorious Hours. Humorist Stan Freberg, a freelance commercial producer who created the Sunsweet prune and Jeno's pizza ads for TV, is pushing another possible cure. It is frankly Utopian. He calls it "The Freberg Part-Time Television Plan: A Startling but Perfectly Reasonable Proposal for the De-escalation of Television in a Free Society, Mass Media-wise." The plan calls for a week like this:

Monday. Television as usual.

Tuesday. The set goes black, but one word shines in the center of the screen: Read!

Wednesday. Television as usual.

Thursday. The set goes black again, but this time we see the word Talk!

Friday. Television as usual.

Saturday. The words Unsupervised Activity.

And Sunday? Says Freberg: "We have to have somewhere to lump all those leftover commercials, don't we? Think of it! Twenty-four glorious, uninterrupted hours of advertising!"

It might just work and it could be worse.

* In a report to Congress last week, the Fed eral Trade Commission recommended by a 3-to-2 vote that cigarette ads be altogether banned from radio and TV. The Commission specifically objected to ads that equate smoking with good times, and noted that in January alone, viewers between twelve and 17 were exposed to a total of 60 cigarette commercials, mainly on such favorite teen-age shows as the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Wednesday Night Movie.

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