Plugs Plugging Plugs

One of advertising's hardiest conceits is that its TV commercials are better than the programs they punctuate. Trouble is, so many commercials are punctuating home-screen viewing these days that the messages blur into one another and are often lost. Now a Pittsburgh-based ad agency, Ketchum, MacLeod & Grove, thinks that it has found a way around the get-lost problem. To grab more attention for a bank in the Houston area, the agency is running the first commercials for commercials.

Usually during the TV news shows, a craggy-faced middle-aged male model flashes onscreen. "In a few minutes,'' he says confidentially, "you are going to see a commercial for Texas Commerce Bank. I have a leading role in this commercial, and you will see me run down a very long corridor. The director made me run down that corridor 18 times. TV is a tough business." At the next commercial break, sure enough, the model appears. Now he is a bank manager scampering down a hallway toward a woman teller who shouts that the bank now has $1 billion in trust. Manager and teller go into a slow-motion dance to the strains of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.

The agency produced two 30-sec. commercials for its commercials. Tony Wake, the Ketchum vice president who dreamed up the idea, had little trouble selling it to the bank's officials, despite the cost of the extra promotions. In advertising, where few hesitate to imitate, the idea could well lead to a plethora of plugs plugging plugs.

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