How TV Got Sold

The art of selling in the upfront's early years

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It’s a warm spring evening sometime in the early 1970s, and the CBS sales guys are holding down the fort at the ‘21’ Club, having commandeered Nixon’s table against the far wall. Frank Hussey, who services the Doyle Dane Bernbach account for the Tiffany Network, is spinning yarns to a group of young salesmen, and while he’s been selling for years and more or less out of circulation, his spiels are usually worth the price of keeping him in Bloody Marys.

Hussey, who jumped into his first upfront

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