Word: pitchman
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...deliberately outrageous, it is because they are. The gimmick game is called "brand recall," and the ground rules dictate that the only ads that anybody remembers are the very good and the very bad. Pretty good does not count. Quick: Which airline promotes its baggage service by shipping its pitchman in a crate with his head sticking out? Everybody remembers greasy kid stuff, but what stuff is supposed to be superior? Which TV manufacturer, to prove that all its money has been poured into developing a better set, shows its board of directors in their undershirts? If a viewer...
Last week Cavett interviewed Comic Pat McCormick, who discussed the possible effects of a steel strike on the California Christmas-tree market. Cavett is still too innocent to prevent a veteran pitchman like Art Linkletter from wresting the show away from him and giving a 15-minute spiel for a new game he helped invent. But in defense, Cavett, a former gag writer, can fall back on old material. Once, he said, when he was out of work, he used to write dirty jokes for kids to use on Linkletter's TV House Party...
...Meet the Press. Called Comment Capsule, it consists of a film interview with a different guest each week. A crewcut, slow-talking fellow, Greenwood, 36, is introduced as the president of the Midwest Federal Savings and Loan Association, but the plug in his "noncommercial commercial" ends there. The real pitchman is the week's visitor, for Greenwood never interrupts nor asks any discomfiting questions. All he does is get the guest started...
Finger Stitcher. And his audience knows him-as a straight, if sometimes confusing, pitchman whose lack of polish is somehow his shining virtue. "There's too much damn talk on TV," he says. "Other variety shows have skillful and amusing hosts, but they spend too much time getting into the act. The most difficult thing in the world is to shut up. Besides, whoever said a master of ceremonies had to be a glamour boy? What counts is the kind of product he puts...
...diagnose only a nagging headache. Still, to the extent that they are aware of p.r.'s largely invisible operations, growing numbers of people suspect that they are being manipulated by hidden "image merchants." Sometimes the p.r. man is regarded as merely an inventor of gimmicks, the old-fashioned pitchman or pressagent with pretensions. Sometimes he is regarded as a new creature with Big Brotherly skills in brainwashing. In fact, the good public relations man is more than a pressagent-though not even the best is ever wholly free of flackery-and considerably less than Big Brother. His calling contains...