P & G to Market

Back in radio's swaddling days (1923), the Procter & Gamble Co. stepped up to the microphone one day with a recipe for devil's-food cake ("take one-half cup of Crisco"). Enough housewives were glued to their earphones at that particular moment to report "program coming in fine." No one quite realized it, but commercial broadcasting was well under way.

Now, after 22 years as radio's best and best-satisfied customer, P & G is radio's biggest buyer of time ($11,014,000 in 1944). Last week Broadcasting magazine recalled P & G's radio success story. It was a story that clo.sely paralleled the whole history of commercial radio.

When Crisco Cooking Talks clicked over New York City's WExF, it was expanded (in 1925) into a network series conducted by Home Economist Ida Bailey Allen. By 1930 P & G strongly suspected that radio was here to stay. Looking around for someone to head its radio department, company officials decided that the copy department chief might qualify. Handsome William McCreary Ramsey II turned out to be a good choice.

He knew--or soon learned--what women who twist the dials like to listen to. His initial reasoning about radio selling was cautious, but sound: if cooking talks could sell Crisco, maybe washing talks could sell soap. They did. Before long he had supplemented Ruth Turner's Washing Talks with the more varied salesmanship of Sisters of the Skillet, Stoopnagle & Budd, and the B. A. Rolfe orchestra. In 1932 (although he disclaims the honor and dislikes the baby's nickname) he officiated at the birth of P & G's outstanding contribution to radio: the soap opera.

Puddles to Vallee. First of Ramsey's five-day-a-week dramatic serials was The Puddle Family, lifted bodily from a comic strip. A year's trial convinced him that his daytime drama was on the right track--but he felt he needed something more emotionally robust than the comic-strip Puddles. Why not build a plot around a kindly, sympathetic prototype of mother? Ma Perkins was last week being renewed for still another (her 13th) year.

Surefire though the soap opera has proved, P & G has continued to experiment. Its current line-up of 19 network shows has only ten daytime operas. After being an early pioneer in audience participation programs (1939) with Professor Quiz, P & G now urges listeners to play Truth or Consequences and to Breakfast in Hollywood, caters to evening dial-twisters with the Rudy Vallee Drene Show and Beatrice Kay's Teel Variety Hall.

Advertiser Ramsey does not give radio all the credit for P & G's soaring gross sales (from $116,593,142 in 1934 to $311,496,273 in 1944), but his whopping ($22 million) radio outlay shows what P & G thinks of radio as a salesman.

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