Saatchi Saatchi Dfs

The farewell episode of "Family Ties" crushed the "Moonlighting" finale and the rest of its competitors Sunday, finishing its seven-year run as last week's top-rated show and propelling NBC to a record-breaking 47th consecutive victory in the weekly prime-time ratings. NBC's unprecedented streak was marred slightly last February when CBS managed to tie the peacock network for weekly honors on the strength of its eight-hour miniseries "Lonesome Dove." But aside from that, the network of "The Cosby Show," "The Golden Girls" and "Cheers" has totally dominated ABC and CBS in this, its fourth straight season as the country's most-watched network.

Looking to get more bang for its ad buck, Vons Co. on Tuesday divided its $25-million ad business between three Los Angeles ad firms that will create and place spots for the chain. DDB Needham will create ads for all Vons grocery stores, while Saatchi & Saatchi DFS will devise ads for its more upscale Pavilions stores. Meanwhile, Western International Media will place the advertisements on TV, radio and in the print media.

It is a striking commercial. When a pilot comes on the loud speaker and announces Northwest Airline's new no-smoking policy, a planeload of passengers break into applause. And if that's not raucous enough, a new ad to air next week shows passengers erupting in loud cheers. Hundreds of miles away from Northwest's headquarters in Minnesota, the corporate officials at RJR Nabisco didn't stand up and cheer when they saw the commercial. RJR, of course, is short for R. J.

When the much ballyhooed ad campaign for Nissan hit the airwaves last month, some folks who live in the Seattle area thought the car maker's new slogan had a familiar ring. Indeed, it does. Nissan is now touting that its cars are, "Built for the Human Race." Meanwhile, one of the Seattle area's biggest regional banks, People's Bank, has used a similar sign-off to its ads for more than a decade: "Member FDIC and the Human Race." The ad agency behind both campaigns: Los Angeles-based Chiat/Day.

If you don't like seeing commercials before films in movie theaters, here's the guy to blame. His name is Terry Laughren. And these days, Laughren is spending a lot of time defending the business of the New York firm of which he is chairman, Screenvision Cinema Network. The company doesn't create ads, but it is a sort of middle man that places 60-second commercials on more than 6,000 movie screens nationwide--or about one-third of all the first-run theaters in the United States.

With the probability that TV writers will go back to work Monday, "There's going to be a lot of pent-up energy that's going to explode in Hollywood," a top industry analyst said Thursday. But the explosion won't be in the Nielsen ratings.

ABC already has lost about $23 million on "War and Remembrance," and some advertising executives say the figure is likely to climb with the concluding episodes that begin airing Sunday. Just as the World War II miniseries failed to generate the ratings that ABC had projected for the first installment last November, so too is the second one expected to fall short of the network's guarantees to sponsors, these executives maintain. ABC has promised to deliver an average rating of between 18 and 19 for the final 11 1/2 hours of "War and Remembrance" (which translates to between 16 million and 17 million homes)

The two hermitic brothers who created the world's largest advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi PLC, said Thursday that they will step down at the end of the year as joint chief executives of the troubled ad firm. Replacing Charles and Maurice Saatchi as chief executive of the London-based advertising and consulting firm is Robert Louis-Dreyfus, 43, who has been chairman of IMS International, one of the world's largest market research firms.

Coca-Cola might not have had to hire Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz last week if--eight years ago--it had only listened to Jay Coleman. Jay who? Coleman is hardly a household name. But the rock superstars that his New York music marketing firm Rockbill has linked up with Pepsi-Cola certainly are. He placed Michael Jackson at Pepsi's doorstep. He brought Lionel Richie to Pepsi at the peak of the singer's career. And it was Coleman who, last summer, persuaded Pepsi to sign on with rapper M.

Not many ad agencies are in the market for staff scientists. Rice/Spector is. The quirky, Venice-based firm helps design and engineer off-the-wall magazine print ads that pop out, light up or chatter. Creativity aside, it takes scientific know-how for the agency to produce such upcoming print ads as those that will: * Include workable, one-shot cardboard cameras that fold to the size of credit cards. * Light up with the use of tiny solar panels.