Not Modest, Because

. . .

What is commonly called "the new permissiveness" has now moved from the worlds of film and fashion into the areas of marketing and advertising. Nudity in advertising is commonplace, along with the single entendre. Highly personal products, which used to be tucked away in the back pages of tacky magazines and in the back rooms of drugstores, have moved right out front.

One of the trickiest marketing jobs that Madison Avenue has ever faced in volves a product that is now being pro moted in full-page, four-color ads in more than a dozen U.S. magazines, in cluding Glamour, Look and TV Guide.

The headline: "Unfortunately, the trick iest deodorant problem a girl has isn't under her pretty little arms."

The ads trumpet Pristeen, a new product of the Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Co., whose sales of Listerine, Roiaids, Bromo-Seltzer and some 1,500 other items added up to more than $700 million last year. Pristeen is, the ads say, "a vaginal spray deodorant" that ought to "be essential to your peace of mind about being a girl." Warner-Lambert executives claim that the multimillion-dollar Pristeen print media campaign is bigger than that for any other new toiletry product in 1969. Pris-teen's chief competitor is FDS (for Feminine Deodorant Spray), a similar product manufactured by suburban Chicago's Alberto-Culver Co., whose advertising is slightly less explicit. Warner-Lambert executives reckon that the new deodorant market will soon be worth around $58 million a year.

Girl-to-Girl Tone. When Papert, Koenig, Lois Inc., a Manhattan ad agency, first got the assignment to handle Pristeen, a group of male copywriters went to work, but their efforts did not quite capture the right girl-to-girl tone. The agency then turned to Peggy Prag, a late-thirtyish creative supervisor who spent six months devising the current approach. Though she found that she could "discuss the vaginal area just like automobiles or detergents" in agency conferences, her own copy clung to euphemisms, at least at first. Market research, including a nationwide survey of 1,200 women, showed that customers care little for the coy approach. As Copywriter Prag puts it: "Women interviewed said, 'Just say it.' "

So she became more direct. One part of her copy had rather shyly allowed that Pristeen is for "the most girl part of you." Later on, when the research results came in, she edited that to "the most girl part of you--the vaginal area."

Also Television. Warner-Lambert has sound reason to speak plainly. When the company first tested small-size, slyly indirect newspaper ads for Pristeen in San Diego and Pittsburgh, the results were indifferent. A later test, using direct, full-page ads in Atlanta and upstate New York papers, as well as more colorful packaging, brought an enthusiastic response. According to Ed Vi-mond, president of Warner-Lambert's products division, that test showed that "80% of adult women are interested in purchasing such a deodorant." Alberto-Culver and its agency, N. W. Ayer, advertise FDS on TV as well as in print. The media have shown some queasiness over the Pristeen ads. LIFE turned them down, but later relented; by then Pristeen had gone elsewhere. The magazine's executives had been bothered by such phrases in the copy as "worry-making odors" and the assertion that Pristeen makes the user "an attractive nice-to-be-with girl." For a while, television's self-regulatory National Association of Broadcasters stoutly upheld its 15-year-old ban on commercials for "externally applied feminine-hygiene deodorant sprays and powders." Last month, after a temporary six-month suspension of the ban brought no viewer complaints about the FDS ads, the N.A.B. lifted the restriction.

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