JACK BENNY GIVES GIFT CARTONS OF LUCKY STRIKES IN THIS CHRISTMAS AD.
LUCKY GETS BENNY
…or should this title be Benny Gets Lucky? After all, Jack Benny signed one of the richest contracts in Network Radio history with The American Tobacco Company, (aka The American Cigarette and Cigar Company), in early 1944. It guaranteed him $25,000 a week for his Sunday evening show to be sponsored by the company’s Pall Mall Cigarettes.
Huh? Pall Mall? Everyone knows that Benny was sponsored for the next eleven seasons by Lucky Strike, American Tobacco’s top selling brand. Where did Pall Mall come from? And that’s what the radio and advertising trade press was asking when American’s secondary brand won the bidding to sponsor Benny.
Pall Mall’s involvement was actually a ploy by George Washington Hill, the crafty 59 year old President of American Tobacco, who had made Lucky Strike a top selling brand of cigarettes in the 1930’s. (See The Lucky Strike Sweepstakes on this site.) His hard selling technique had made “LS/MFT” the country’s most familiar advertising slogan in 1943. (1) Hill wanted to outbid his competition for Benny’s program yet avoid an expensive bidding war.
The “auction” itself was the result of a singular set of circumstances that began back on October 14, 1934, when the ten year old General Foods Company first slotted Jack Benny into early Sunday evening prime time at 7:00 p.m. ET on the Blue Network to sell its Jello fruit flavored gelatin. (2)
The program became a Top Ten hit for Blue, finishing fifth in 1934-35, then second only to Major Bowes’ juggernaut Original Amateur Hour on NBC in 1935-36. Benny had become Network Radio’s most popular comedian and it didn’t take much convincing for General Foods to move him up to the Red chain in 1936. His first show on NBC from October 4, 1936 is also posted below. Surprisingly, no mention is made his new network home. (3)
Benny’s smart contract dealings first entered the picture at the end of the 1936-37 season when his program reached Number One. The radio supervisor for General Foods’ advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, was Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, who agreed to give Benny refusal rights to the products that he would accept to advertise on his program. (4)
That concession backfired on the sponsor in 1939 when - after two successive seasons at Number Two behind Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy - Benny refused to replace the successful Jello with General Foods’ struggling Grape Nuts Flakes breakfast cereal as his sponsor. Not even a new three year contract and a raise could budge him, but World War II did three years later.
Wartime sugar shortages curtailed the production of Jello and Benny reluctantly said goodbye to the product that he could justifiably claim that he put into millions of kitchens. His final broadcast for Jello from May 31, 1942, is also posted below as well as his first show for Grape Nuts Flakes on October 4, 1942.
Meanwhile, Benny had signed another contract with General Foods that gave him, not his sponsor, full control of his half hour on NBC at the conclusion of the 1943-44 broadcast season. That, plus a letter he had obtained from NBC, guaranteed him the 7:00 p.m. Sunday timeslot for as long as he wanted it. These two documents, unique in Network Radio, gave Benny ownership of both his show and its time period, which allowed him to sell his program intact to the highest bidder.
All of this activity was being watched with interest by George Washington Hill at American Tobacco. Hill had casually talked about Benny’s availability with his young advertising manager, Pat Weaver, whom he had hired away from Young & Rubicam in 1938. Weaver personally knew all of the principals involved from his three years at Y&R so it was natural that Hill consulted with him on the smartest - and most economical - way to land the coveted sponsorship of Jack Benny.
Hill had seen his competitors swing from music programming to comedy in the 1942-43 Top 50. (5) American Tobacco sponsored Kay Kyser’s popular Kollege of Musical Knowledge, tied for eleventh place in the Annual Top 50, and Your Hit Parade with Frank Sinatra at Number 29, but Hill wanted more comedy. Hill wanted Benny and Hill was accustomed to getting what he wanted. Although Pat Weaver had left his company for wartime service in the Navy, Hill put into action a plan that had all the markings of Weaver’s cleverness and finesse.
A sealed auction for sponsorship of The Jack Benny Show on NBC in the 1944-45 season and beyond opened quietly in late 1943. Bids were accepted by Benny’s agent and on February 24, 1944, the winner was announced to most everyone’s surprise: Ruthrauff & Ryan Advertising, representing American Tobacco’s Pall Mall cigarettes, with a winning bid of $25,000 a week for three, 35 week seasons totaling $2.625 Million payable to Benny for all production and payroll costs plus an additional $200,000 fund for promotional purposes. In addition, the winner assumed all network and line charges.
The identity of the winner and the enormity of the bid stunned the advertising community - just like Hill and Weaver had planned because they knew that no one would take Ruthrauff & Ryan’s bid for its minor brand, Pall Mall, seriously. But if American Tobacco’s agency for Lucky Strike, Foote, Cone & Belding, were to enter the bidding, its presence would certainly attract R.J. Reynolds for Camels and possibly other competitors as well, thus driving up the price unreasonably high.
Surprisingly, none of the trade journals picked up on this bit of possible chicanery. Instead they dweled on General Foods’ loss of its star salesman. The March 1, 1944, Variety reported: “Benny’s break with General Foods and Young & Rubicam was the result of dissatisfaction with the agency’s exploitation and publicity of his overseas trips for the USO, “…not comparable to the treatment given other stars.” He also complained about the agency’s censoring of certain jokes in his script which other comedians had greater latitude. American Tobacco offered a three year contract at a $2,500 per week raise and an additional $200,000 over the three years in personal promotion for Benny. General Foods was willing to meet his weekly price but on a one year basis and no promotional guaranteed.”
The final Jack Benny Program under General Foods’ sponsorship on June 4, 1944, is also posted below. Not much mention is given to the fact, but three days later a full page ad appeared in Variety:
TO GENERAL FOODS And YOUNG & RUBICAM: Sunday, June 4th was our final broadcast with you as sponsor and advertising agency. It rounded out what for me has been a glorious ten years’ working relationship. Ten years is a long time - a tenth of a century, when you stop to figure. As far as I am concerned those ten years have been so pleasant, so full, that the time went all to quickly. So, on signing off commercially I thank you for all you have done to make that short decade joyous and productive. And signing off commercially is not signing away a friendship.
JACK BENNY
(Me, Too!) MARY LIVINGSTONE.
And that was that. Benny left six weeks later on a 21 day USO tour of Australia and the South Pacific with actress Carole Landis, singer Martha Tilton, harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler and accordionist June Brunei. As far as the trade press was concerned, Benny would begin his 1944-45 season on October 1st for Pall Mall cigarettes.
Then Hill dropped the other shoe on August 28th. American Tobacco announced that Pall Mall sales volume didn’t justify the huge expenditure of $25,000 a week and it was switching sponsorship of the newly acquired Jack Benny Program to Lucky Strike. The company thanked Ruthrauff & Ryan for successfully representing Pall Mall in the bidding for Benny's program and as its reward the agency would collect commission on the NBC timebuy, not Foote, Cone & Belding, Lucky Strike’s agency of record. (6)
A week later American Tobacco broke a comprehensive, multi-media ad campaign heralding Lucky Strike’s new sponsorship of Jack Benny on NBC. The campaign, which obviously took time to create and place, was estimated to cost $250,000 and countered General Foods’ $170,000 campaign for its new Kate Smith Hour opposite Benny on CBS.
Benny’s first show for Lucky Strike on October 1, 1944, is also posted below. Unfortunately, the only recording available is the edited version for Armed Forces Radio, with no commercials or mention of Lucky Strike, although the entire show with surprise guest Fred Allen and character actor Russell Hicks, playing George Washington Hill, is built around the new sponsor.
However, thanks to Laura Liebowitz, President of The International Jack Benny Fan Club, (president@jackbenny.org) we present a PDF of that show’s original script, posted below. It's a real treasure. The following Sunday’s Benny broadcast complete with its two and and a half minutes of American Tobacco commercials is posted from October 8, 1944, with guest Frank Sinatra.
Lucky Strike stayed with Benny on Network Radio for eleven years, through his switch to CBS in 1949 and up to his final live broadcast on May 22, 1955, also posted below. By that time George Washington Hill had been dead for almost a decade but his trickery of 1944 carried on even further into Jack Benny’s Sunday night television series for Lucky Strike on CBS-TV. By that time both had made millions of dollars from their sponsor and star relationship.
No wonder Benny often whistled or hummed the cigarette's familiar jingle melody on his show, "Be happy, go Lucky...be happy go Lucky Strike...."
(1) Radio listeners were constantly reminded in the 1940’s that, “LS/MFT…Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco!”
(2) Blue had pioneered early Sunday prime time in 1933 with The Bakers’ Broadcast starring comedian Joe Penner at 7:30. When Benny replaced the syrupy Silken Strings at 7:00 followed by Penner, Blue had a full hour of comedy to open its Sunday night programming.
(3) This program is also the debut of a very subdued Phil Harris in the Benny cast - a far cry from the character he later developed.
(4) Pat Weaver left Young & Rubicam in 1938 to become Advertising Manager of American Tobacco - a post he held through World War II while serving in the U.S. Navy in the Office of Inter-American Affairs. He returned to Young & Rubicam to direct its radio and television activities from 1947-49. Weaver is most noted for his years at NBC, 1949-56, when he created the weekend-long Monitor for NBC Radio and NBC-TV’s Today and Tonight shows. He was the father of actress Sigourney Weaver.
(5) Brown & Williamson’s Raleigh cigarettes had Red Skelton, (#2), and People Are Funny,(#40). More importantly, Hill’s arch rival, R.J. Reynolds’ Camel cigarettes had Abbott & Costello, (#11), Jimmy Durante & Garry Moore, (#31), Blondie, (#36), and young comedian Herb Shriner, (#49).
(6) Pall Mall didn’t receive notable Network Radio exposure until the 1946-47 season when the brand sponsored NBC’s newspaper-based reality series, The Big Story. But in 1954 Pall Mall once again relinquished its sponsorship of the show to Lucky Strike.
(Also see Sunday At Seven, Benny's Double Plays, Sunday's All Time Top Ten and "Your Money Or Your Life!" on this site.)
Copyright © 2017, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
…or should this title be Benny Gets Lucky? After all, Jack Benny signed one of the richest contracts in Network Radio history with The American Tobacco Company, (aka The American Cigarette and Cigar Company), in early 1944. It guaranteed him $25,000 a week for his Sunday evening show to be sponsored by the company’s Pall Mall Cigarettes.
Huh? Pall Mall? Everyone knows that Benny was sponsored for the next eleven seasons by Lucky Strike, American Tobacco’s top selling brand. Where did Pall Mall come from? And that’s what the radio and advertising trade press was asking when American’s secondary brand won the bidding to sponsor Benny.
Pall Mall’s involvement was actually a ploy by George Washington Hill, the crafty 59 year old President of American Tobacco, who had made Lucky Strike a top selling brand of cigarettes in the 1930’s. (See The Lucky Strike Sweepstakes on this site.) His hard selling technique had made “LS/MFT” the country’s most familiar advertising slogan in 1943. (1) Hill wanted to outbid his competition for Benny’s program yet avoid an expensive bidding war.
The “auction” itself was the result of a singular set of circumstances that began back on October 14, 1934, when the ten year old General Foods Company first slotted Jack Benny into early Sunday evening prime time at 7:00 p.m. ET on the Blue Network to sell its Jello fruit flavored gelatin. (2)
The program became a Top Ten hit for Blue, finishing fifth in 1934-35, then second only to Major Bowes’ juggernaut Original Amateur Hour on NBC in 1935-36. Benny had become Network Radio’s most popular comedian and it didn’t take much convincing for General Foods to move him up to the Red chain in 1936. His first show on NBC from October 4, 1936 is also posted below. Surprisingly, no mention is made his new network home. (3)
Benny’s smart contract dealings first entered the picture at the end of the 1936-37 season when his program reached Number One. The radio supervisor for General Foods’ advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, was Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, who agreed to give Benny refusal rights to the products that he would accept to advertise on his program. (4)
That concession backfired on the sponsor in 1939 when - after two successive seasons at Number Two behind Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy - Benny refused to replace the successful Jello with General Foods’ struggling Grape Nuts Flakes breakfast cereal as his sponsor. Not even a new three year contract and a raise could budge him, but World War II did three years later.
Wartime sugar shortages curtailed the production of Jello and Benny reluctantly said goodbye to the product that he could justifiably claim that he put into millions of kitchens. His final broadcast for Jello from May 31, 1942, is also posted below as well as his first show for Grape Nuts Flakes on October 4, 1942.
Meanwhile, Benny had signed another contract with General Foods that gave him, not his sponsor, full control of his half hour on NBC at the conclusion of the 1943-44 broadcast season. That, plus a letter he had obtained from NBC, guaranteed him the 7:00 p.m. Sunday timeslot for as long as he wanted it. These two documents, unique in Network Radio, gave Benny ownership of both his show and its time period, which allowed him to sell his program intact to the highest bidder.
All of this activity was being watched with interest by George Washington Hill at American Tobacco. Hill had casually talked about Benny’s availability with his young advertising manager, Pat Weaver, whom he had hired away from Young & Rubicam in 1938. Weaver personally knew all of the principals involved from his three years at Y&R so it was natural that Hill consulted with him on the smartest - and most economical - way to land the coveted sponsorship of Jack Benny.
Hill had seen his competitors swing from music programming to comedy in the 1942-43 Top 50. (5) American Tobacco sponsored Kay Kyser’s popular Kollege of Musical Knowledge, tied for eleventh place in the Annual Top 50, and Your Hit Parade with Frank Sinatra at Number 29, but Hill wanted more comedy. Hill wanted Benny and Hill was accustomed to getting what he wanted. Although Pat Weaver had left his company for wartime service in the Navy, Hill put into action a plan that had all the markings of Weaver’s cleverness and finesse.
A sealed auction for sponsorship of The Jack Benny Show on NBC in the 1944-45 season and beyond opened quietly in late 1943. Bids were accepted by Benny’s agent and on February 24, 1944, the winner was announced to most everyone’s surprise: Ruthrauff & Ryan Advertising, representing American Tobacco’s Pall Mall cigarettes, with a winning bid of $25,000 a week for three, 35 week seasons totaling $2.625 Million payable to Benny for all production and payroll costs plus an additional $200,000 fund for promotional purposes. In addition, the winner assumed all network and line charges.
The identity of the winner and the enormity of the bid stunned the advertising community - just like Hill and Weaver had planned because they knew that no one would take Ruthrauff & Ryan’s bid for its minor brand, Pall Mall, seriously. But if American Tobacco’s agency for Lucky Strike, Foote, Cone & Belding, were to enter the bidding, its presence would certainly attract R.J. Reynolds for Camels and possibly other competitors as well, thus driving up the price unreasonably high.
Surprisingly, none of the trade journals picked up on this bit of possible chicanery. Instead they dweled on General Foods’ loss of its star salesman. The March 1, 1944, Variety reported: “Benny’s break with General Foods and Young & Rubicam was the result of dissatisfaction with the agency’s exploitation and publicity of his overseas trips for the USO, “…not comparable to the treatment given other stars.” He also complained about the agency’s censoring of certain jokes in his script which other comedians had greater latitude. American Tobacco offered a three year contract at a $2,500 per week raise and an additional $200,000 over the three years in personal promotion for Benny. General Foods was willing to meet his weekly price but on a one year basis and no promotional guaranteed.”
The final Jack Benny Program under General Foods’ sponsorship on June 4, 1944, is also posted below. Not much mention is given to the fact, but three days later a full page ad appeared in Variety:
TO GENERAL FOODS And YOUNG & RUBICAM: Sunday, June 4th was our final broadcast with you as sponsor and advertising agency. It rounded out what for me has been a glorious ten years’ working relationship. Ten years is a long time - a tenth of a century, when you stop to figure. As far as I am concerned those ten years have been so pleasant, so full, that the time went all to quickly. So, on signing off commercially I thank you for all you have done to make that short decade joyous and productive. And signing off commercially is not signing away a friendship.
JACK BENNY
(Me, Too!) MARY LIVINGSTONE.
And that was that. Benny left six weeks later on a 21 day USO tour of Australia and the South Pacific with actress Carole Landis, singer Martha Tilton, harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler and accordionist June Brunei. As far as the trade press was concerned, Benny would begin his 1944-45 season on October 1st for Pall Mall cigarettes.
Then Hill dropped the other shoe on August 28th. American Tobacco announced that Pall Mall sales volume didn’t justify the huge expenditure of $25,000 a week and it was switching sponsorship of the newly acquired Jack Benny Program to Lucky Strike. The company thanked Ruthrauff & Ryan for successfully representing Pall Mall in the bidding for Benny's program and as its reward the agency would collect commission on the NBC timebuy, not Foote, Cone & Belding, Lucky Strike’s agency of record. (6)
A week later American Tobacco broke a comprehensive, multi-media ad campaign heralding Lucky Strike’s new sponsorship of Jack Benny on NBC. The campaign, which obviously took time to create and place, was estimated to cost $250,000 and countered General Foods’ $170,000 campaign for its new Kate Smith Hour opposite Benny on CBS.
Benny’s first show for Lucky Strike on October 1, 1944, is also posted below. Unfortunately, the only recording available is the edited version for Armed Forces Radio, with no commercials or mention of Lucky Strike, although the entire show with surprise guest Fred Allen and character actor Russell Hicks, playing George Washington Hill, is built around the new sponsor.
However, thanks to Laura Liebowitz, President of The International Jack Benny Fan Club, (president@jackbenny.org) we present a PDF of that show’s original script, posted below. It's a real treasure. The following Sunday’s Benny broadcast complete with its two and and a half minutes of American Tobacco commercials is posted from October 8, 1944, with guest Frank Sinatra.
Lucky Strike stayed with Benny on Network Radio for eleven years, through his switch to CBS in 1949 and up to his final live broadcast on May 22, 1955, also posted below. By that time George Washington Hill had been dead for almost a decade but his trickery of 1944 carried on even further into Jack Benny’s Sunday night television series for Lucky Strike on CBS-TV. By that time both had made millions of dollars from their sponsor and star relationship.
No wonder Benny often whistled or hummed the cigarette's familiar jingle melody on his show, "Be happy, go Lucky...be happy go Lucky Strike...."
(1) Radio listeners were constantly reminded in the 1940’s that, “LS/MFT…Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco!”
(2) Blue had pioneered early Sunday prime time in 1933 with The Bakers’ Broadcast starring comedian Joe Penner at 7:30. When Benny replaced the syrupy Silken Strings at 7:00 followed by Penner, Blue had a full hour of comedy to open its Sunday night programming.
(3) This program is also the debut of a very subdued Phil Harris in the Benny cast - a far cry from the character he later developed.
(4) Pat Weaver left Young & Rubicam in 1938 to become Advertising Manager of American Tobacco - a post he held through World War II while serving in the U.S. Navy in the Office of Inter-American Affairs. He returned to Young & Rubicam to direct its radio and television activities from 1947-49. Weaver is most noted for his years at NBC, 1949-56, when he created the weekend-long Monitor for NBC Radio and NBC-TV’s Today and Tonight shows. He was the father of actress Sigourney Weaver.
(5) Brown & Williamson’s Raleigh cigarettes had Red Skelton, (#2), and People Are Funny,(#40). More importantly, Hill’s arch rival, R.J. Reynolds’ Camel cigarettes had Abbott & Costello, (#11), Jimmy Durante & Garry Moore, (#31), Blondie, (#36), and young comedian Herb Shriner, (#49).
(6) Pall Mall didn’t receive notable Network Radio exposure until the 1946-47 season when the brand sponsored NBC’s newspaper-based reality series, The Big Story. But in 1954 Pall Mall once again relinquished its sponsorship of the show to Lucky Strike.
(Also see Sunday At Seven, Benny's Double Plays, Sunday's All Time Top Ten and "Your Money Or Your Life!" on this site.)
Copyright © 2017, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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