newspapers. When you add television, tracking studies record a dramatic increase in penetration. A word of warning to Chief Executive Officers: if you appear in your own commercials, you will be recognized wherever you go and thus become an easier target for kidnappers. More serious, you may not say your lines as well as a professional announcer. Alphabet soup Whatever you do, for goodness sake, don’t change the name of your corporation to initials. Everybody knows what IBM, ITT, CBS and NBC are, but how many of the following can you identify: AC, ADP, AFIA, AIG, AM, AMP, BBC (Brown Boveri and British Broadcasting), CBI, CF, CNA, CPT, CEX, DHL, FMC, GA, GE, GM, GMAC, GMC, GTE, HCA, IM, INA, IU, JVC, MCI, NIB, NCP, NCR, NDS, NEC, NLT, NT, OPIC (not to be confused with OPEC), TIE, TRW, UBS. Yet this is how 37 corporations sign their advertisements. It will take them many years and many millions of dollars to teach their initials to their publics. What a waste of money. Can advertising influence legislation? William H. Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, used to say, ‘The public be damned.’ Abraham Lincoln thought otherwise: ‘With public opinion on its side, nothing can fail. With public opinion against it, nothing can succeed.’ Where do people get their information on public issues? Largely from television, and less from the newscasts than from folk heroes like Robert Blake and Jane Fonda. Ms. Fonda says things like this on television: ‘You’d better get the guts to stand up to the black shadow of oil before it spills across your desk, oozes into your campaign coffers, seals your ears and blackens your hearts. Because if you do not hear our cries now, you will harvest the grapes of wrath.’ Just try writing advertisements which can deal with this kind of rhetoric. In recent years corporations have been using advertising in attempts to influence public opinion on such issues as energy, nationalization and