We'll Be Right Back

The bane of every broadcast outlet are the incessant pauses that have to be taken to sell somebodys stuff. Early days of radio or television took very few breaks per hour, because advertisers were willing to pay out the wazoo for air time.
In the 50's, it was not unusual for a half hour show to have one sponsor for the entire show. On television, the show would open with some announcer saying, "Brought to you by....", and 15 minutes later, a live 60 second commercial would sell the product. At the end of the program, the announcer would come back with, " This show has been brought to you by....", and that was that. I did a ton of live commercials on radio, and wrote almost all of them. Ads were, "in house" productions, then something started where the sponsor himself wanted to voice the spot. I, almost always used humor, and many character voices I would do to try and get the best response possible for the advertiser. Early radio ads made sense, and people listened. Now, ads on radio and television can cause riots, boycotts, 15 hours of discussion on CNN, and are as rediculous as one can imagine.
It seems that creatures other than people, are the main spokes things for television products, and I cannot imagine why. There is a huge bee with an accent like Ricardo Montelban selling you allergy spray. Multi colored cartoon bears with toilet paper stuck on their butts,green blobs having a disco party in your stomach, a duck with Gilbert Godfried's voice selling insurance, and a lizzard selling another brand. Yo quero, Taco Bell?
The gecko ads are curious. Madison Avenue decides to make the company employees look to be as stupid as possible. One of their ads shows a man, supposed to be the CEO of Geiko, I surmise, having a conversation with an accented lizard, and decides he is going to fall over backwards and have the 4 inch reptile catch him, and this guy is playing the head of the company. Sure, buy your insurance from us. Wait till you see the rest of the people in the office.
Demographics are the target in television. If you are home sick, incapacitated, or retired, you will be bombarded with ads selling you AARP, life insurance, free wheelchairs, or help with the biggest plight on the planet, Mesothelioma. A stupid device to crack an egg, every time you turn on any channel during daytime TV.
Ever notice when some cleaner is being promoted, the area cleaned has not been cleaned since the Johnson Administration? Even the cleaning utensils, i.e. mops and brooms are regarded by humans in the commercials, as ordinary talking items, and it is commonplace for old sponge mops to pack a bag and get on a bus. Why is it, whenever a somewhat tedious task is being performed in these commercials, it is always by some woman, shaking her head in disbelief, a huge schlock of hair hanging over her face, and is always, always filmed in black and white? Recently, an ad for a special pair of rubber gloves was being offered to help alleviate a horrendous issue in this country...peeling potatoes. Yes, yes, I know, something we all dread, and would rather go to the dentist than do, ever. So here's these gloves. Rubber gloves...with some sort of bumps all over the palms of the gloves. The idea is to grind off the peels..isn't that amazing? But wait, there's more. Announcer espouses the quality of this miracle idea.."No more peeling for hours!"..enter the black and white clip of the woman struggling in vain to get the peels off with a potato peeler.
The most heartwarming part of this ad is announcer then telling you what you can do with the 74 pounds of potatos you just sanded smooth...you ready?..."You can make, mashed potatos, potato salad..and tons of french fries with the french fry do-dad, a $20.00 value, your's free! The potatos in this add, are pristine, no eyes, splits or discolorations at all. But one thing they never told you. The potatos had to be boiled before these gloves would work. Nothing I like better than boiled french fries. Have you seen the one about the electric stair chair? This thing is attached to rails on a staircase, and can transport you up or down, while you sit and enjoy the scenery of your wall. The announcer opens this spot up with the following.." Most senior citizens suffer the most falls causing them great injury. The answer to this? Don't fall". Wish I thought of that the last 3 times I took a header down the cellar stairs.
Have you, or somebody you, know died from taking this drug? I did, but I'm dead, so can't join in on the class action lawsuit. Got a headache? Try New Clompamaosin. You'll feel better in 15 minutes. Some people who use Clompamaosin suffer hair loss, rickets, false pregnancy,bleeding from the eyes, ears and rectal area, scurvey, coma, diabetes, excessive vomiting and body odor, infected gums,stroke, heart attack,cirhosis and genital fungal growth...but man, you won't have a headache.

Another inovation in advertising is cramming 45 seconds of dialogue into the last 10 seconds of a commercial. This is radio's version what is at the bottom of the TV screen, in print one sixteenth of an inch high, in 35 lines that you can's read on a 60 inch screen, even if you had longer than the 3 seconds it is shown there.
The tricks to get you to buy things have been around a while. Remember GL70? To this day I have no idea what that is, but it worked. I still remember it. Now there's a whole slew of things nobody knows anything about, but I am not going to run out and buy something because it is now made with South American Hoodia. Have we lived this long, somehow without il casei immunitas? Now made with real chicken?? What the hell was in it before? I saw a box of macaroni and cheese, with a banner printed across the front reading, " Now even more cheese taste." That's not possible.
The bag of powered cheese cannot taste more cheesier. It's powered cheese. After you cook it in the oven for 45 minutes, the instructions warn you that the product will be hot. Thanks..appreciate the concern.
Order before midnight tomorrow. If you call in the next ten minutes..soon to be put back in the vaults for ten years. All designed to make you think you heard something else. Years ago, when mail order was the thing, you always had a PO box on the address. There were no PO box numbers your order went to. That was a way for the seller to track where the business was coming from. Still done today on informercials. If the PO box number you send on your order is 1 2 3 4, well, let's say thats at TV station code in Chicago. They get 300,000 orders with that PO box code. Conversly, the PO box is 5 6 7 8, and they get 22 orders, they pull their sponsorship from that station, and try somewhere else.
We'll double the offer, ABSOUTELY FREE!!! Just PAY shipping and handling, and postage, and processing, and tax, and this means you could have made two of these things in your cellar from old car parts for about a fifth of what we're charging you.
The bottom line for me is, if a sponsor wants you to respond to his ad, he will not use mini print or speed talkers, he won't offer you a free duplicate of the thing you are ordering, that you don't even need one of anyway, nor will he use double talk to make you think you heard something else and have to dive for the phone immediatly, or try to sell you a $300 item with the scam line that you can TRY it in your home for just $14.95. So many people get sucked into this sort of deal, it is astonishing.
There was once a company up here called Tommy Van Scoy's Diamond Mine. They're long gone now, but once I did a parody live on the air about this place. Tommy had an unusual voice, like the Carvel Ice Cream guy did. I called it Jockey Van Short's Diamond Dump, and rattled off the most rediculous spot I could think of. Later that day, they pulled their advertising for what I did. Somebody from there must have heard it. The GM of the station was wild. The next day, they called back and increased their advertising on the station. Seems, for some reason, they got more feedback in one day from the parody I did than at any other time they could recall.
The power of advertising. You never know what is going to work, and sometimes why it does But things have changed in that world, and I don't think for the better. Just ask Chuck Woolery. "We'll be back in 2 and 2". That phrase is now in the same category as Tippycanoe and Tyler too. If Chuck was still on currenty TV, he mostly would be saying, "Right back at cha in 6 and 6."
Back in the 80's there was a guy trying to foist upon the American public a product called Dream Away. This guy looked like he had produced sleeazy movies all of his life. He told you to take these pills, and you would lose weight overnight. You would just dream it away. The FDA and the FCC shut them down because it was a scam. Gee, what are the odds? To this day though, I remember that commercial, because it promised the weight would go away while you slept, and I still wonder where it went, in your bed while you slept. And you thought bed bugs were nasty.