From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

When it comes to demonstrating quality, TIME, like any product, must speak for itself -- and does, week after week, in the vivid and dramatic terms that exemplify our style of journalism. Still, we believe it never hurts to go outside our own pages, and even outside the print medium, to remind people of the importance, relevance and leadership of TIME in its field. In that spirit, we launched a major television advertising campaign last week that is unlike any promotion we have undertaken before.

The first phase of the campaign consists of five 30-second commercials that will air prominently over the next four months on such national shows as the Summer Olympics coverage, 60 Minutes and Larry King Live. The spots, created by the Fallon McElligott agency of Minneapolis, are far from our usual "call to action" ads with an 800 number that viewers can call for a subscription. Instead, they focus on recent stories that have particularly broad significance and impact on people's lives. The tag line: "If it's important to you, you'll find it in TIME."

Shooting the spots sometimes involved tricky logistics, as TIME promotion director Timothy Nix discovered when he supervised one illustrating our cover story on the beleaguered Colorado River and its effect on the nation's water system. The ad required a lone trout to swim in a tank as the water level rose and fell. Tim reports that 200 fishy hopefuls were brought in from a trout farm, under the care of a trained trout wrangler. Dozens had to be auditioned before the admakers found a star fish capable of navigating the ups and downs of the role. "I kept saying 'That's my trout! That's my trout!' because he was behaving so beautifully," laughs Tim.

Other commercials encountered fewer problems but employ equally memorable imagery to underscore the theme. One dramatizes our Nov. 11, 1991, cover story on privacy by showing a small round hole being sawed from the other side of a blank wall, and then an eye appearing in the hole. Another, keyed to our coverage of the Los Angeles riots, shows a touching sequence of photo portraits, each of which ignites and burns as the narrator quotes Rodney King: "Can we all get along?"

"This is a campaign that reminds readers that beyond giving them the news of the week, TIME gives them more," says Linda McCutcheon Conneally, our marketing director. "More depth, more analysis, more information that can really help them live their lives better."