Word: cottes
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...must be what the admen call "sincere." This means that his devotion to the product he is selling rivals the dedication of an old-style Japanese samurai to his Emperor. Stark is everywhere conceded to bring the "utmost in sincerity" to his commercials. Says NBC Vice President Ted Cott: "He's got the real calico touch." According to CBS's James Sirmons, when a TV director wants super-sincerity in a commercial, he tells the announcer: "Give it the Dick Stark treatment...
...Harder Mess. Moonfaced Promoter Cott, 35, general manager of NBC's outlets in Manhattan (radio, WNBC; television, WNBT), believes in plastering and bombarding potential radio listeners with elaborate little gags and gimmicks. Says he: "If you take a big bomb and drop it, you cause a lot of damage, but it can be cleaned up right away. I like to drop a lot of little bombs. The mess is harder to clean...
...Most of Cott's bombs have produced more whistle than blast. Among them (on radio): a weekly children's newscast by H. V. Kaltenborn ("Good morning! Last week two bad men tried to kill the President of the United States . . ."); short disk-jockey stints by Conductor Leopold Stokowski and Hollywood's Sam Goldwyn, Walt Disney and Arthur Treacher; programs by Poet Carl Sandburg (folk songs), Eleanor Roosevelt (interviews), baseball's Jackie Robinson (children's disk-jockey quiz). Of these, Robinson and an all-night recorded symphonic series -which started only last week-are the only...
...Cott was in charge of programing for Manhattan's independent WNEW when NBC hired him away in 1950. "WNBC," he says, "was suffering from malnutrition of excitement. They wanted me to make it a truly local station." In this respect, the new manager is a notable success. Local sponsors have increased steadily; so has the local listener-rating since Cott introduced such events as club newsbroad-casts ("The Bronx Chapter of Hadassah will meet Monday night") and other "public service" shows...
...Tougher Guy. Cott's $35,000-a-year salary is high, but he feels he earns it. Most of WNBC's little stunts, including the tape-recorded telephone horror, he thinks up himself ("Lots of people have good ideas, but they don't know what to do with them"). The rest he whips together from staffers' suggestions: "I have great faith in the creative aspects of people. Mostly I have to fight with them to make them as good as I think they are, and that makes me a tough guy sometimes. If they...