Word: pitchmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ordinary citizens who crowd by car, bus and train to the arid site of Minosa's entombment and settle down cheerfully in tents and trailers for a morbid spectators' holiday. With them come radio and TV showmen and a neon-lighted traveling carnival, with Ferris wheel, pitchmen, hamburger stands and a hillbilly band bawling a specially concocted ballad, We're Coming...
From carnivals, boardwalks, county fairs and street corners across the U.S. the glib salesmen known as "pitchmen" were rushing into television. In the New York area alone, TV pitchmen expect to reap a $10 million harvest this year. This week Manhattan Adman Harold Kaye will have nearly 20 of his pitchmen doing more than 130 hours of solid selling on TV, hawking such merchandise as $1 card tricks, electric irons, luminous Christmas tree ornaments, infrared-ray broilers, talking dolls, $39.95 wristwatches (on "easy, generous terms...
Make It Look Easy. Pitchmen, happily tracing their ancestry back to the ancient Phoenician traders who once unloaded junk jewelry on Greek housewives, have not changed much in the past few thousand years. But in recent years they have moved indoors; first as department store demonstrators and then as radio salesmen. TV, however, is a pitchman's paradise: he reaches a large audience and is visible as well as vocal. "The pitchman's spiel is not as important as his hands," says 36-year-old Harold Kaye. "He sells in proportion to how skillful he is at manipulating...
Call It Education. Pitchmen are somewhat cramped by TV station rules limiting the amount of time that can be given to commercials.* Adman Kaye solves this problem by buying time in 1½-hour chunks, scheduling a movie and then breaking it up for repeated four-minute pitches. To the battered televiewer, the breaks in the movie seem all but unendurable, the TV pitches all but interminable. But Kaye is careful to explain that demonstrating how something works comes under the heading of education, not selling. "It's only when we get into our turn (see glossary) that...
Kaye has noted approvingly that more & more big network shows are using pitchmen's techniques: "Whenever a performer demonstrates an article and sells it, he's a pitchman. Arthur Godfrey is one of the greatest; he has many of the pitch techniques." But Kaye looks with tolerant amusement on Sid Stone, an apostle of the high pitch whose rapid-fire commercial spiels for Texaco are an adornment of the Milton Berle show. "Stone's not a pitchman," Kaye says condescendingly, "he's just an entertainer...