The New Power of TV Advertisers : The increasing clout of sponsors has been seen more and more this season as ‘objectionable’ shows make some hit lists

When Dave Boylan received an elaborately wrapped package in his mail last December, he assumed that one of his business associates had sent him a Christmas present. As vice president and general manager of the ABC-affiliated television station serving Winston-Salem, N.C., Boylan often receives small gifts from the companies selling him the syndicated programs that WGHP-TV airs, such as “Regis & Kathie Lee” and “House Party.”

“What I expected to be a box of candy was in fact a videotape from Geraldo Rivera,” recalls Boylan, whose station airs the controversial talk show host’s “Geraldo” every weekday at 10 a.m. “It was essentially Geraldo’s statement that he realized he had probably created topics last November that were too hot and too exploitable, and that he would seek a different course.”

At issue was a monthlong series of shows on topless doughnut shop operators, battered lesbians and similar topics. Calculated to boost Rivera’s audience during a key ratings sweeps period, the sex-themed programs backfired badly: Not only did they prompt complaints from outraged viewers and nervous station managers, but they also caused several major advertisers to move “Geraldo” to the top of their so-called hit lists--internal rankings of “objectionable” shows in which companies do not want their commercials to appear.

These hit lists have begun to shape today’s syndicated TV programming and, to a lesser extent, prime-time network fare.

Rivera’s aggressive, winter-long battle against defections by sponsors, stations and viewers is symptomatic of an acute sensitivity to controversial content this season that has already contributed to the cancellation of some TV shows and the overhaul of others. Changes implemented over the last several months by the producers of “Geraldo” and other reality-based series have helped assure their survival for at least another season, but other syndicators have abandoned the genre altogether in favor of more advertiser-friendly game shows, situation comedies and talk programs.

“I’ve been selling national TV advertising for 10 years and right now there is significantly more sensitivity to programing on the part of clients and their ad agencies than I’ve ever seen,” observes Clark Morehouse, the executive spearheading the “Geraldo” makeover for Tribune Entertainment Co., the show’s Chicago-based distributor.

Advertiser hit lists are nothing new. Since the inception of television, sponsors have maintained “don’t buy” policies involving programs with which, for a wide variety of reasons, they want nothing to do.

Often the reasons are entirely benign. “Campbell’s wouldn’t want an ad for its tomato soup to air after a bloody stabbing,” points out Stephen Battaglio, associate editor of Adweek magazine. “No advertiser wants its spot to run next to material that might tarnish the image of its product.”

Today’s hit lists, however, have swollen to include some of TV’s highest-rated syndicated series and several popular network shows, including “thirtysomething,” “China Beach” and “Dallas.” These programs are being rejected as much for their themes, style and tone as for specific product-related content.

While there is no unanimous opinion on why advertisers have become so wary of potentially offensive programming, industry executives interviewed by The Times suggest that sponsors have been sensitized by a combination of events and circumstances. Some say today’s soft economy and cluttered media environment have prompted companies to seek wholesome product images that will be acceptable to a wider spectrum of viewers and, theoretically, yield more sales. Others feel advertisers are simply trying to avoid the unwanted publicity that came their way amid last year’s debates over the propriety of “Married . . . With Children,” “The Morton Downey Jr. Show,” “Favorite Son” and other boundary-pushing shows.

“There’s no doubt that (society) has been in a more conservative mode since the late ‘70s,” says Marc Feidelson, senior vice president and media director for Dailey & Associates, a Los Angeles ad agency. As a result, he says, “things that are sensationalistic get put on a hit list.”

The nation’s conservatism has fueled the campaigns of self-appointed TV watchdogs, many of whom are now directing publicity campaigns and economic boycotts against advertisers who appear on shows they consider excessively violent, sexual, profane or “un-Christian.”

“I am very much against the Don Wildmons and Terry Rakoltas of the world,” declares Chuck Bachrach, senior vice president of Western International Media, in a reference to the most prominent advocates of tamer programming. “But big advertisers are so afraid of their letter-writing campaigns that they sometimes don’t think it’s worth the effort to fight (such activists), even if there is a big rating at stake.”

What bothers one advertiser may not concern another, however, and most shows are able to find replacements when a would-be sponsor backs away--provided they aren’t on too many hit lists and have decent ratings.

Still, this season, more than any in recent memory, audience size often seemed irrelevant to a sponsor’s pull-out decision. “A Current Affair,” for example, turned up at the head of a hit list prepared by the New York-based consulting firm Telerep and published last February in the trade weekly Electronic Media. Although the tabloid series is among the most-watched syndicated shows in America, “A Current Affair” was being “resisted” by 94 potential sponsors on the Telerep list.

Telerep President Steve Herson confirmed authenticity of the document in published reports but did not return telephone calls from The Times asking about its preparation. Herson told Electronic Media that the list, which he referred to as an internal document to help the company’s sales force, was compiled by polling buyers of national TV ad time and cross-checking their responses with Broadcast Advertising Reports, a statistical index of commercial usage.

Distributed to Telerep clients in January, the index of “sponsor resistance” claimed 92 advertisers were staying away from “Inside Edition,” another syndicated tabloid, and 91 were avoiding “Geraldo.”

Just how many millions of dollars programmers are losing to hit lists is a matter of conjecture, but knowledgeable sources at Tribune Entertainment estimate that the series has lost as much as $4 million a month because of depressed national ad rates. They acknowledge that several key stations have either preempted objectionable segments, moved the series to less lucrative time slots or declined to renew their contracts.

Officials representing other tabloid shows concede they have suffered similar losses but insist, like Tribune, that there are plenty of stations and advertisers eager to replace defectors.

But other program suppliers are getting the message. “If anyone came in during the last few months and spent five minutes trying to sell me a series, four minutes was spent telling me how advertiser-friendly the product was,” laughs one station manager looking to replace “Geraldo” with two game shows.

Not all objections concern the syndicated fare appearing outside prime time.

Cropping up on several hit lists, including Telerep’s, are Fox’s “Married . . . With Children,” CBS’ “Rescue 911,” NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries” and ABC’s “thirtysomething.”

The latter series was conspicuously avoided by several major advertisers earlier this season when co-producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick included a scene in which two homosexual male characters were shown having an intimate conversation in bed.

ABC lost an estimated $1.5 million on the episode, even though the network had persuaded Herskovitz and Zwick to tone down the scene, which originally had the two men kissing.

“I felt the way the network handled that segment was very supportive,” says Herskovitz, reserving his considerable wrath for timid corporations that he believes now pull their commercials at the slightest hint of controversy.

“Even if you’re selling soap, I think you have to be mindful of the effects of such actions,” he sighs, likening today’s skittish sponsors to the national book-sellers refusing to display Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” for fear of upsetting Islamic fundamentalists. “There is a real danger of TV taking a giant 30-year step backward to the time when advertisers controlled the content of programs.”

A few weeks after “thirtysomething’s” bedroom scene aired, ABC faced similar advertiser resistance to a made-for-TV biography about Rock Hudson that made no secret of the late actor’s homosexuality.

“(Advertisers) do not want to be involved, and rightly so, in controversy or controversial themes,” explains Alfred R. Schneider, vice president of policy and standards for Capital Cities/ABC Inc. “They certainly do not want to be the subject of boycotts or customer dissatisfaction.” He insists, however, that advertisers are never allowed to override the “independent judgments” of ABC censors about what is appropriate for broadcast.

Earlier this season, CBS apologized to General Motors for some sexually suggestive moments in an episode of its “Wiseguy” series. The scene, which CBS spokesman George Schweitzer now admits “may have gotten a tad too steamy,” prompted a phone conversation between the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a long-time critic of CBS programing through his Christian Leaders for Responsible Television (CLeaR-TV), and John McNulty, GM’s vice president of public relations. Wildmon’s complaint was followed by a barrage of letters from CLeaR-TV supporters to GM Chairman Roger B. Smith.

McNulty, explaining that a single offended viewer may represent a loss of car sales for years to come, later announced a revamp of its pre-screening policies aimed at insuring that a similar slip-up never happens again.

Like most major advertisers, the auto maker will continue to pay an outside agency to review advance tapes of every entertainment program in which its commercials are scheduled to appear. In an unprecedented move, it has also stationed a GM unit manager in the screening company’s New York office to make sure ads are pulled from any shows “that may gratuitously exploit sex and violence, dishonor religions or racial groups, or present one-sided treatment of controversial issues.”

“Last year,” McNulty points out, “General Motors withdrew 67 commercials from programs judged unacceptable. Nevertheless, there were isolated incidents where, because those who screened our programs were unfamiliar with our policies, GM advertising did appear where it should not have.”

Lorraine Antoniello, vice president of Advertising Information Services, a New York-based company that scrutinizes virtually every prime-time network program on behalf of 50 major ad agencies and their clients, says the most sensitive areas continue to be sex, violence, profanity, drugs, alcohol and religion. “They’re concerned about all those things,” she confirms, “plus controversial issues, of course. Shows that deal with abortion and stuff like that.”

Antoniello disputes claims that her screeners have been placed in the effective role of censors.

“All of our clients assess our pre-screening reports and do what they like,” she says. “We never contact the network people directly. We never have and I don’t ever expect we will.”

One reason General Motors and other major advertisers are reluctant to appear within reality-based syndicated shows, according to Antoniello, is the difficulty in obtaining copies of episodes far enough in advance to make judgments about their content. Although steps are being taken to address the problem, some programs cannot even tell advertisers what the topic of their shows will be from one day to the next.

“Almost everybody has an episodic rule,” explains John Mandel, senior vice president and director of national broadcasts for the Grey Advertising agency in New York. “If we can’t pre-screen it or tell them what the topic is, some clients just won’t run in the show.”

One tabloid series, “A Current Affair,” has made a concession to advertisers by scheduling at least one “soft” episode each week, carefully structured so as not to offend sponsors, viewers or station managers.

“We bear in mind the needs of our station clients first and then the advertisers in the way we formulate decisions with respect to program content,” explains Michael Lambert, the Los Angeles-based president of domestic syndication for 20th Century Fox Television Corp., which distributes “A Current Affair.” Lambert insists that the hit lists controversy “hasn’t affected our clearances or bottom-line yet, but we are concerned about it because we see it on the horizon.”

“We are doing internal research and sales research to make sure that we are being sensitive to the concerns,” he continues. “But we want to be very careful so that we don’t become a mouthpiece for any advertiser and that we maintain our First Amendment privileges.”

“I got rid of the baby killers and sleazy sexual deviants,” explains Westin, now a King World vice president. “We’ve adopted ‘the clean air act of the ‘90s’ as our credo.”

Paramount, meanwhile, has denied reports that the recent cancellation of two of its syndicated shows, “Friday the 13th: The Series” and “War of the Worlds,” was a result of advertiser resistance. The studio says it pulled the plug on the programs because of lackluster ratings and because sufficient “Friday the 13th” episodes had been produced to insure its future in syndication. But an anti-violence advocacy group believes otherwise.

“Our national protest campaign convinced more than 30 national advertisers to reduce or eliminate their advertising in ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Freddy’s Nightmares’ (a syndicated Warner Bros. series),” declares David Boyd, director of public affairs for the National Coalition on Television Violence. According to Boyd, the Illinois-based group began writing protest letters last summer to sponsors of the two shows, citing excessive violence, gratuitous sex and Satanistic overtones.

“We’ve chosen to avoid ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Freddy’s Nightmares,’ ” confirms Lt. Col. David Fredrikson, assistant director of accession policy for the U.S. Defense Department, which had been running recruitment ads on the two shows. “They deliver a very good audience for us of career-oriented, 18-year-old males . . . (but) we are also concerned about what our name and image appears next to. We share the same concerns as the coalition does, and we don’t want our image associated with one of Satanic culture and Satanism. I imagine if ‘Cosby’ had a Satanic theme we’d pull our ads from that show as well.”

Asked to estimate how many protests his office had received concerning “Friday the 13th,” Fredrikson guessed the volume average at “maybe one letter every couple of weeks.”

Patricia Bevilacqua, who pulled ads from the same series on behalf of SmithKline Beecham Consumer Brands, said fewer than a hundred letters prompted her decision.

“If there are a substantial group of people who are offended (by a program), then certainly we’re going to look into it,” she explains, adding that her firm was spending “a considerable amount of money” on “Friday the 13th” and “Freddy’s Nightmares” to promote sales of its Vivirin, Oxy-10 and Oxy-Cler health products. A review of several episodes led SmithKline Beecham to withdraw from the two shows because of concerns about Satanism, profanity, sex and violence, she says.

“These programs were really not something we wanted to be on,” she says. “It is true to some extent that (the pull-out) was because of NCTV’s campaign.”

Despite NCTV’s apparent success with some advertisers, the group now regarded as the most influential advocate of toned-down programming is the Rev. Wildmon’s Christian Leaders for Responsible Television, which he co-directs with the Rev. Billy Melvin of Wheaton, Ill.

“We have sensitized the corporate world,” says Melvin, who also serves as executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals. “We’ve made them aware of the problem, and I think they’re responding.”

CLeaR-TV “does not have a hit list of shows,” Melvin insists. “A series can be fairly good one time and be very bad the next.”

But Melvin concedes that his organization does maintain a “hit list” of advertisers whom CLeaR-TV regards as supporters of “bad” programming.

“These companies have been playing games with the American public by telling viewers they wouldn’t support offensive programs and doing just the opposite,” says Melvin. “We feel it’s time that they be held accountable for that kind of shabby procedure.”

CLeaR-TV launched a formal consumer boycott of Mennen and Clorox last July to protest the broadcast advertising choices those firms made last May. Sources at both companies contend that the boycott has had absolutely no economic effect on their operations. Clorox, in fact, reports sales increases of more than 11% over the past nine months. But just 10 days ago, CleaR-TV called off the boycott against Clorox because it said the company had reduced its sponsorship of objectionable programming by two-thirds and had assured CLeaR-TV that it would continue to avoid such programs in the future.

David L. Goodman, vice president of public affairs at Clorox, says that the boycott had not prompted the company to toughen its existing advertising guidelines--which prohibit purchasing time on any program that contains graphic or gratuitous sex or violence, disparages any ethnic or religious groups, treats individuals in a disparaging manner or glorifies the use of drugs or alcohol. But Goodman admits that the action by CLeaR-TV caused Clorox to conclude that the company occasionally had been lax in enforcing those guidelines, and the company now supplements the screening of programs by an outside agency with previews by its own employees.

“We are responding not so much to the group, but to its members,” Goodman said. “When we receive letters from families that say, ‘We love and have always used your products, and our parents and our grandparents used your products, but we’re not going to buy your products anymore because you are associated with this kind of television show,’ we respond to that.”

Both Melvin and Wildmon claim several other major corporations now discuss their prime-time advertising decisions directly with CLeaR-TV, although they will not divulge any names. The organizers of CLeaR-TV, who consider themselves guardians against “un-Christian” programming, are pleased with this response.

“We started going to the sponsors (with programing complaints) because, very frankly, we were not making any progress in dealing with the producers and networks themselves,” Melvin explains. “When we went to the sponsors, we got results.”

Programming executives at the three major networks have all publicly conceded that they paid closer attention to content this season than last, blaming last season’s excesses on everything from the writers’ strike to cutbacks in the number of staff censors. Each network now asks producers to forward to them rough cuts of any programs that could ruffle advertiser feathers, and some sponsors now get to look at made-for-TV movies six weeks or more before air time.

At the so-called fourth network, Fox executives declined to discuss advertiser hit lists on the record, but one official privately conceded that Fox is keeping a closer eye on the content of its shows, which are singled out more often than any appearing on ABC, CBS and NBC.

The 36-page Telerep hit list, for example, counts 40 advertisers “resisting” placement on “Married . . . With Children,” four times the number avoiding “thirtysomething.” Other shunned Fox shows include “America’s Most Wanted” (46 advertisers), “21 Jump Street” (12), “Cops” (24), “The Reporters” (19), “The Tracey Ullman Show” (13), “The Simpsons” (11) and “Alien Nation” (10).

“Viewers like this kind of programming and obviously they don’t find it offensive or they wouldn’t watch it,” says Mike Levinton, vice president and director of programming for New York-based Blair Television. “Yet the advertisers are afraid to go into these things because of the controversy they create. I find some paradoxes there.”

So do broadcasters. But many find themselves in a crunch. There has been a significant downturn in national TV advertising in general. Sales have been soft for the past year and show signs of even more softening.

“When your cash-flow was growing at 12 to 15% a year,” says Dave Boylan of WGHP-TV, “it may have been OK to ignore some advertiser who didn’t want to buy time on ‘The Gong Show.’ But now, when cash-flow and operating profits are not growing at nearly those rates for many of us (in the TV industry), we’re willing to pay more attention to complaints.”