Clio, Muse of Huckstery

Doesn't this grab you?

Ozon--the hairdressers' hairspray that leaves hair feeling like hair.

It grabbed someone, at any rate, being the key line in a one-minute television commercial that last week won "Recognition"' status in the fourth Annual American TV Commercials Festival. More than 1,200 anxious admen collected in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria to hear the list of winners. But it was not just a list. It was a galactic catalogue of categorical triumphs.

Autos Close. Best in the "Pet Foods and Products" group, for example, was the Gaines Gravy Train gasser, where all those little ducklings eat out of the same bowl with a Great Dane. Polaroid's little boy with the trumpet, playing Minuet in G while his daddy snaps his picture, was tops in "Gifts, Cameras, Watches." The competition in the "Auto Accessories" classification was fantastically close and exciting. Goodyear's frustrated commuter, with his summer treads spinning in a snowdrift, just edged out Purolator Oil Filter's Moonlight Ride--the one with the terrific looking girl who gets in under the car in her evening dress, removes a clogged oil filter with a monkey wrench, and smears oil sludge all over her date when she kisses him.

High Fees. All in all, winners in 56 categories got Clios for individual excellence (a Clio, named for the muse of history, is a slim gold statuette that could be the result of an affair between an Oscar and an Emmy). Then there were maybe a dozen canonizations--a ceremony raising selected older commercials to the status of "Classics." For example, that box of Tide that used to stand under the cypress tree on the Monterey Peninsula is now in the hall of fame with Willie the Penguin, The Marlboro Man, and the yellow that went for Pepsodent.

In four years, the American TV Commercials Festival has become so popular that it could be described as an advertising man's Cannes. It costs $20 to enter a commercial, but 1,367 were entered this year. Luncheon tables at the Waldorf go for $250 each.

The festival grosses $85,000 yearly--which is to say that Wallace A. Ross grosses $85,000 a year, because the almost imperceptible fact is that the American TV Commercials Festival is essentially a one-man show. The man is Wally Ross, 39, who is just a little less aggressive than a 200-lb. gnat.

He made a career on the fringes of broadcasting before he got the idea for the festival. Now he spends nine months a year accepting entries and entry fees, thinking up new categories for new winners, and creating the general aura that he is the next best thing to the Nobel Prize Committee. Taking his favorite U.S. commercials with him, he travels in Europe for an additional month each fall, collecting service fees from Old World admen who want to study U.S. techniques. The other two months are free and clear.

In his view, the festival is not just a moneymaker. It is a service to the poor geniuses who think up commercials. "It has given something to these people, who take a lot of abuse," says Ross. "It's given them something to go home with and justify themselves to their families."

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