If the ad has guys, gals, cool cars and hot steering wheels, even a minute is too short.

If an ad has guys, gals, cool cars and hot steering wheels, even a minute is too short

If you think TV commercials have been getting shorter but there are more of them, you're right. The high cost of TV advertising time frightened advertisers into running shorter commercials years ago, so TV stations now cram their commercial breaks with millions of short messages -- sometimes as brief as 10 or 15 seconds.

But Murray Kalis thinks people might pay more attention to a longer commercial, if it's done right. So Kalis, the creative director at Coen, Kalis & Moiselle, has put together a 60-second spot that debuted during the Indy 500 race last week.

The commercial is for Sport Grip, the lace-on steering wheel cover that is made by Van Nuys-based Superior Industries, a $250 million (annual sales) manufacturer of auto parts and accessories.

Kalis' spot for Sport Grip features a variation on the boy-meets-girl theme. The twist, as you might expect, is that the secret of getting and keeping the girl is to have a Sport Grip on your steering wheel. It's all done in a very moody way, featuring a sultry lass and two guys competing for her attention in a hot desert setting where dust and sex fill the air. The girl chooses one guy but then rejects him when he burns his hands on a sun-scorched steering wheel that lacks a Sport Grip. She chooses, of course, the guy who drives with a Sport Grip.

Kalis says the typical 30-second spot of today is too short to tell such a story. The 60-second commercial pretty much disappeared some time after the 1960s, he says, and it reappears only occasionally when Coke or Pepsi wants to do something big.

Kalis says he didn't produce the full-minute spot out of nostalgia, though he does wax rhapsodic about the 49 Mercury that the bad guy drives in the commercial. His reasons have more to do with what he considers the limitations of the 30-second commercial.

Advertising research wisdom says 30 second commercials are a better deal because they are two-thirds as effective but only half as expensive as 60-second commercials, Kalis says. But prevailing wisdom can be wrong, and Kalis believes the extra money an advertiser pays for a 60-second spot is justified if the commercial is well done. Kalis believes a good 60-second commercial packs more creative wallop and gets the viewer involved more than a 30-second spot.

"In a 60 you can tell a story. It is very difficult to tell a story in a 30. A 30 is more like a print ad. You can deliver a message, but you don't have time for a beginning, a middle and an end," Kalis says.

The story is aimed at driving home the Sport Grip selling point: It keeps your hands cool in the summer. Kalis' spot emphasizes that point by unselling the sizzle, so to speak. When the guy who doesn't get the girl grabs the steering wheel, his hands burn with a sizzle that sounds like bacon frying.

Sport Grip has been around for a long time but has been little-advertised on television, says Ralph Zucker, general manager of the Superior Industries aftermarket division, which markets the steering wheel cover.

Zucker says the Sport Grip also keeps your hands warm in the winter, but the new ad campaign concentrates on the wheel cover's hot weather benefits because Superior sells most of its Sport Grips in Sun Belt states. The commercial, for example, ran in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Memphis and Atlanta.

Zucker says Superior has promoted the Sport Grip mainly through trade advertising in the past, but it's aiming the new campaign at consumers in an effort to hang onto its hefty share of the market for steering wheel covers.

Zucker explains that, as big discount chains like K-Mart and its competitors have consolidated, they have started looking for cheaper, overseas sources of steering wheel covers. By advertising to consumers, Superior hopes to create a demand for its product that will dissuade retailers from switching to other suppliers. The 60-second commercial and some 30-second variations of the same thing are scheduled to run again the week of June 10 in hopes of boosting sales of Sport Grip as a Father's Day gift.

Kalis says that, thanks to the 60-second commercial, the 30-second commercials for Sport Grip will be more effective. "If you run a mix of 60s and 30s, viewers can carry the memory of the 60 when they see the 30, which makes the 30 richer than it otherwise would be," Kalis says.