The Hotfoot

Advertising men treated each other to some unusually frank talk about their trade last week. At the annual eastern meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies in Manhattan, the scientific approach" to consumer resistance took the worst pasting.

Said Walter Weir, of Manhattan's Walter Weir, Inc.: "You have only to read some of the incredible drivel being foisted upon the American public ... to realize that today's copywriter--bred on copy research--has become a virtual Katzenjammer Kid ... giving readers and listeners mental and spiritual hotfoots hour after hour, every day in the year." Radio copywriters, said Weir, are among the worst offenders: "Through slavish obeisance to Hooperatings [see RADIO] . . . [radio] has become largely hackneyed and stereotyped."

Foote, Cone & Belding's Ralph B. Austrian sounded an even more ominous note on the loss in radio listeners. The gist of his news: Television sets are wooing away from radio a rapidly increasing part of its audience and establishing "a new trend in listening habits. The final effect will be a reduction in radio billings." The cash thus freed, thought Austrian, would soon begin to flow into television, for which he saw a bright future. By the end of next year, he predicted, television would command an audience of 4,500,000 with 750,000 television sets.

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