Bringing Home the Duck

Soaring sales and earnings usually inspire businessmen to spend more money promoting their products. Since business is at its best in many years, the spenders are breaking all records. Advertising expenditures in 1963 rose 6% to reach $13.1 billion--the first jump beyond $13 billion. Advertising Age, the journal of the ad world, announced last week that the 100 leading national advertisers alone spent a record $3.17 billion on ads and sales promotion, up 10.5% from the previous year. Procter & Gamble, the nation's largest soapmaker, pulled ahead of General Motors to become the No. 1 U.S. advertiser. The top ten (in millions of dollars):

Procter & Gamble 200

General Motors 160

Ford Motor 101

General Foods 101

Sears, Roebuck 87.5

Lever Bros. 82

Bristol-Myers 76

Colgate-Palmolive 74

American Home Products 70

General Electric 67

The biggest advertiser of them all uses ten different ad agencies, advertises 42 different products, spends 10.4% of its $1.91 billion in sales on pushing its products (v. G.M.'s 1%). Procter & Gamble lays out a hefty $20 million per year to promote Tide, and Tide has captured 17% of the lucrative heavy detergent market. P. & G.'s Crest ($16 million for advertising) accounts for almost 33% of all toothpaste sales, Gleem for another 17%. Ivory Liquid ($8,500,000) has cleaned up 18% of all liquid detergent sales, Joy and Thrill another 12% and 8% respectively. Duncan Mines cake mix has 27% of the ready-mix cake market. Introduced only last fall, Head & Shoulders already accounts for 23% of all shampoo sales, thanks to the $12 million in advertising P. & G. shelled out to promote it.

P. & G. believes in pouring in ad money disproportionately to sales until a new product gets to the point, as a P. & G. executive puts it, where "it brings home the duck to dinner." The success of this formula makes P. & G. confident that the unfamiliar products it is test-marketing today--Velvet Skin soap, Top Job liquid cleanser and The Max blue detergent tablet--will also become household words tomorrow, thanks to the power of advertising.

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