Deals

Why Governor John Y. Brown will be cleaning up in the nation's bathrooms

JOHN Y. Brown, Jr., brought you Kentucky Fried Chicken. Phyllis George Brown, a former Miss America, brought you N.F.L. small talk and CBS morning news. And together they brought you four colorful years as governor and First Lady of Kentucky.

Now John Y. brings you Indoor Advertising of America— the greatest thing, in Madison Avenue parlance, since indoor plumbing. Indeed, the idea is to sell advertising space in a hitherto overlooked medium: toilet cubicles.

Brown doesn’t really want to talk about it until the news is out. He’s afraid that rivals may catch on before his gung ho sales force can grab all the choice locations.

So far, some three dozen advertisers have signed up for test markets in Louisville, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. Pepsi, Fruit of the Loom, and Hertz are among those whose plastic-encased, magazine-size ads have already adorned the doors inside the stalls that Indoor Advertising has rented from major landlords around the country. And in 1985, the business is being rolled out into New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and the other six of the topten U.S. cities.

“It is brilliant,” says one convinced client. “You go there 3.5 times a day, twenty-five days a month, and there’s nothing to distract your attention for sixty seconds. It reaches executives, men and women, who have money to spend and are well educated, the kind of people advertisers always want. And those kinds of people are getting harder and harder to reach, because they don’t watch much television anymore."

Also, the ads are a bargain— 18,000 sites at $1.62 each. Calculated on Madison Avenue’s cost-per-thousand basis, that is one-sixth the price of TV commercials.

Tackling the taste question— “What’s a nice little ad like you doing in a place like this?’ ’—Indoor Advertising promotional material cites a study done by advertising giant McCannErickson showing that consumers do not have a negative reaction to the ads.

Judging by the positive reaction to Brown’s previous ventures—a close associate estimates Brown’s net worth at over $ 100 million—Indoor Advertising should clean up. Having built Colonel Sanders and his eleven secret ingredients into the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain, John Y. sold it to Heublein, the distilled-spirits conglomerate, in the 1970s. Then he tried to replicate his K.F.C. success with two other fast-food concepts, Lum’s and Ollie’s Trolley, and dabbled with the ownership of professional basketball teams.

He met Phyllis George, 197l’s Miss America, and they married, each for the second time, in 1979. Their whirlwind courtship was followed by a whirlwind gubernatorial campaign. Having won the election, Brown frequently referred to the governor’s office in the plural, kind of “me and Phyllis are governor,” and starred in ads promoting Kentucky as “the state that’s run like a business."

Today, at fifty, John Y. shuttles between Cave Hill Place, his luxurious Lexington farm, and his Trump Plaza co-op, in Manhattan, his brimming energy belying the fact that a year ago he nearly died of a heart attack. Now twenty pounds slimmer, he’s still interested in political office, but friends say most of his efforts are channeled into Indoor Advertising.

“I have seen advertising on the back of theater tickets, moving billboards, in taxicabs,” says a Madison Avenue veteran. “There’s almost nothing that hasn’t been tried except this, and I think John Y. has another Kentucky Fried Chicken here. This could be a $400-million-ayear business.

Ann Ryan