Television Commercials

Lawrence and Columbia (Chris) Menkin have become a model couple in their golden years. Married for 46 years, their favorite words are now, "Lights, camera, action!" The Menkins have been to dozens of local auditions during the last year, and have landed jobs in television commercials for Kodak, Pacific Telephone, Monterey Vineyards and the Bay Pacific Health Plan. They've also played bit parts in feature films shot on location, including Francis Ford Coppola's "Peggy Sue Got Married."

Excessively loud television commercials should be a thing of the past, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission. Responding to years of complaints that the volume on commercials was much louder than that of the programming that the ads accompany, the FCC on Tuesday passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act to make sure that the sound level is the same for commercials and news and entertainment programming. "Most of us have … experienced this ourselves: You're watching your favorite television program, or the news, and all of a sudden, a commercial comes on, and it sounds like someone turned up the volume — but no one did. Today, the FCC is quieting a persistent problem of the television age: loud commercials," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement.

Students across the country got the news Monday along with a sales pitch for candy, razors and cheese snacks when the advertiser-supported classroom program Channel One went on the air. "I think it is a good idea," said Powell High School student Jim Addington, 17, one of the first to see the Channel One news program, beamed nationwide for the first time to 400 schools.

Have food and beverage commercials aimed at kids gotten better since companies like Kellogg's, Nestle, Coca-Colo Co. and McDonald's Corp. pledged to cut back on ads featuring unhealthy fare? It depends on how you define “better,” a new study finds. Food and drink advertising on TV is big business, adding up to about $745 million each year, according to the study published Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. More than half of those dollars are spent trying to reach kids under the age of 12. Those ads work: Other studies have shown that as kids are exposed to a greater number of enticing commercials for sugary drinks, salty snacks and meals cooked in deep fryers, the heavier they get. So a group of researchers from the University of Illinois in Chicago hunkered down with TV ratings data from Nielsen Media Research.

Television commercials are not usually considered educational fare, clever as may be the ways of hawking candy, potato chips and expensive running shoes. But that could change.

Easy Ride Into Advertising: Dennis Hopper is going commercial. After spending most of his Hollywood career as a rebel, Hopper has signed with a Los Angeles production company to direct television commercials. "I think that in a lot of aspects it's a more creative way of expressing yourself," Hopper told Advertising Age magazine. On Friday, Hopper will give the closing speech at Advertising Age's four-day marketing forum in Chicago.

CHAUNCEY, THE COUGAR The Lincoln-Mercury big cat appeared in TV commercials from 1973 to 1981. Chauncey, who was owned by two California professional animal trainers, was the car's official mascot although other cougars sometimes appeared in the television commercials. Chauncey died in 1979 and the cougar campaign continued until 1982 when a youngster was mauled by a promotional cougar hired in the Pittsburgh area.

Gillette Co., maker of top-selling Duracell batteries, sued Ralston Purina Co. to stop television commercials claiming its Energizer batteries last longer and showing the Energizer Bunny torching rival batteries. The suit filed in U.S. District Court in New York seeks damages of more than $75,000 and a halt to the commercials, which Gillette says are misleading and falsely smear its product, in violation of U.S. and New York law.

Miller Brewing Co. is laying to rest its long-running "Tastes great . . . less filling" advertising debate. In commercials that start next week, Miller will try to broaden Miller Lite's appeal beyond the low-calorie segment of the beer business. "It's It. And That's That" is the slogan of the new Miller Lite campaign. The new ads will also push the notion that light beer is well on its way toward displacing the full-calorie version as the drink that beer drinkers think of when they order a beer.

Paramount Pictures, perhaps best known for making movies such as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the Star Trek films, said Tuesday that it will soon begin filming something else--television commercials. The Hollywood studio, which is a division of Gulf & Western Corp., has created a new unit, Paramount Images, that will exclusively produce commercials for television.

Corporate turnaround expert Sanford C. Sigoloff, credited with leading ailing companies such as Wickes Cos. out of bankruptcy but criticized by many as a tough-as-nails boss, has died. He was 80. Sigoloff died of complications from pneumonia Saturday with his family by his side at his Brentwood home. He also had Alzheimer's disease. Sigoloff, whose stern voice and lean figure were familiar to millions of Southern Californians from his "We got the message, Mr. Sigoloff" television commercials for Wickes' now-defunct Builders Emporium chain, was an ace at salvaging debt-laden companies.

Go Daddy, known for racy TV commercials, plans to reveal something more in its Super Bowl ads Sunday. The registrar for Internet addresses will be promoting the Web domain extension .co, a short version of the popular and ubiquitous .com, during the most-watched sporting event of the year. "We believe it deserves some special promotion," said Bob Parsons, chief executive and founder of Go Daddy Group Inc. "People identify with .com, and .co is just one step less. It's like the other .com.

In 1992, Debi Austin had a laryngectomy after she was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. Austin had smoked her first cigarette at 13 and, even after surgery, remained a two- to three-pack-a-day smoker. The image of her smoking through the hole in her throat in a 1997 state-sponsored anti-smoking ad has remained indelible. In the ad she said: "They say nicotine isn't addictive. " She took a puff and asked: "How can they say that?" Austin, of Canoga Park, finally quit smoking months after the ad aired.

When Jon Nesvig left NBC to join Rupert Murdoch's Fox Broadcasting in 1989 as its chief ad salesman, the "weblet" ? as it was then called ? had plenty of detractors who didn't believe it could take on the Big Three of ABC, CBS or NBC. Nesvig ran into one, an ad agency executive, in Grand Central Station who looked at him in bewilderment and blurted, "Jon, how could you do that?" For Nesvig, an inveterate salesman, the decision was easy. He'd been at NBC nearly 15 years. But the No. 1 network had been taken over by General Electric, and he was uneasy about the forced march to GE's infamous executive boot camp in Croton-on-Hudson in New York.

The accusations rain down on Cathy Wyatt throughout the day as she brews espresso drinks at Carpe Diem, a cozy downtown coffee shop inundated by sharp-toned political ads blaring from a television above the counter. "You just have to tune them out, because if you believed any of them, every single person should be in jail," Wyatt said with a weary chuckle. "There'd be nobody left to vote for. " But ignoring political advertising is a tough feat in Ohio's 16th Congressional District, which has seen one of the year's biggest influxes of third-party campaign spending in House races as Republicans try to wrest the seat from Rep. John Boccieri, a freshman Democrat.

A new study confirms what any grip, camera operator or location manager already painfully knows: California is bleeding film jobs. The state has lost more than 36,000 jobs and $2.4 billion in wages over the last decade as production has migrated away, according to a report by the Milken Institute, a nonprofit economic think tank co-founded by former highflying 1980s Wall Street player Michael Milken. Aptly titled "Film Flight," the Milken report is the most comprehensive analysis to date of the economic toll of so-called runaway production that has hammered L.A.'s movie and television production economy and the thousands of below-the-line workers and support companies that depend on it. The survey runs through 2008, the last year for which federal and state labor data were available, and thus understates the extent of the job losses because it doesn't cover the recession that prompted widespread layoffs in the industry.

As the camera pans through a marble room, a statue of a flute player, carved from the same beige marble, sways in time to his own music. As if fulfilling King Midas' dream, the flutist and the other statues in the room turn to gold, glittering in the light. Suddenly, a white ball appears and fills the screen with the familiar brush-stroke logo of The Wave, KTWV-FM (94.7).

Television news in the classroom? It's a fine idea if made relevant and executed with care and vision. Cable News Network appears to have done just that with "CNN Newsroom," its weekday newscast for schoolkids that premiered in this morning's wee hours, available for window-shopping by teachers who may want to regularly tape it and show it to their students when school resumes next month.

Dave Wilkinson steered his pickup truck along a bumpy dirt road before making a sharp turn across a train track and parking in front of three big-top tents that rise above fields of beets and garbanzo beans. Wilkinson lowered his window to talk to a set decorator as they waited for a locomotive to reposition 14 wooden railway cars to be featured in the Fox film "Water for Elephants," based on a book about a traveling circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression. "The train has become a rolling prop," said Wilkinson on a recent sweltering weekday afternoon.

Nevada released a series of television ads Thursday mocking the California Legislature in an attempt to lure businesses from the state. It's the latest effort by Nevada's development authority to woo Golden State companies. This time around, the commercials portray California lawmakers as talking orangutans. "Las Vegas is driving me bananas taking business from California," says one primate (with the help of a human voice-over). "Please don't go." The spots tout Nevada's lack of corporate and personal income taxes, calling the state the "capital of the new mega-West."