• by Dana Blankenhorn , March 20, 2003

If you sell newspaper or broadcast ads to Federated Department Stores, stay by the phone. With the outbreak of war with Iraq, Federated’s division advertising managers are taking a day-by-day approach to keeping their schedules.

"I’m sure there will be some changes," said Burdines spokesman Cary Watson in Miami, Florida on Tuesday. "We’ll be making the changes as close to deadline as possible. This means we can make some decisions three days ahead."

In Seattle, Washington, The Bon Marche can make decisions even closer to deadline, changing or canceling newspaper creative just 48 hours from printing, said spokesman Jack Arndt. "We don’t anticipate changing any creative. If anything we’ll cancel ads," he said. But when we spoke on Wednesday, no decisions had yet been made. "We’ll look at it on a daily basis. That’s all we can do at this stage."

In Atlanta, Georgia, Ellen Fruchtman is spokesman for Rich’s-Macy’s in Georgia, for the Lazarus stores in the Midwest, and for Goldsmith’s in Tennessee. Her ads are transmitted electronically, and sometimes the creative is tied to news, like the result of a basketball tournament, going out when the final buzzer sounds. But here, too, caution is the watchword. It was easy to tell on Tuesday that Fruchtman was choosing her words carefully, and that her own bosses had yet to make final decisions. (On Thursday, Rich’s-Macy’s ad schedule in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran as normal.)

"The feeling I got is we’re acutely aware of the current environment,” Fruchtman said. “It’s too soon to say because we don’t know what will happen, but we will certainly be looking at our strategies. I don’t want to go into detail because it’s all contingent on what happens. We will still run the business, that’s what we’re here to do."

At Bloomingdale’s, spokeswoman Anne Keating spent most of Wednesday trying to get an answer from ad manager Tony Spring and came back with this. "We’re going to look on a day by day basis."

A MediaVest study released this week indicated most consumers now accept ads during a war, but that humor is out, and no one wants to be the brand that "this war is brought to you by."

But at the retail level that advice may not be sufficient. In some places store traffic may stop, while in others it may remain normal, depending on events and the community’s association with the military. Some customers may want to lose themselves in shopping while others will be lost in prayer. A store’s advertising department must make sure it antagonizes neither customer. No wonder ad managers are concerned about what to tell the press. So we’ll conclude by noting that the answers above are subject to change, based on events, and without notice.