Word: pitchmen
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...theme, "Just Do It," which urges would-be customers to get off their couches and onto their exercise bicycles, has been widely praised. But Reebok's recent "Let U.B.U." ad campaign, which starred eccentric characters in surrealistic situations, was considered a bust. All the major manufacturers have hired celebrity pitchmen. Nike pays multitalented pro athlete Bo Jackson to sell its cross- trainer shoe, and Joan Benoit Samuelson to advertise its running line. L.A. Gear keeps retired Los Angeles Lakers star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on its payroll; his former coach Pat Riley is under contract with Reebok...
...odds, this transition once again will be a shirttail operation, underfunded, ill defined, rushed and harried by spoilsmen and political operatives. Campaigns have become an industry of moneygrubbers and pitchmen, only a few of whom should be allowed into power. The nation and Ronald Reagan might have been better off had 1980 Campaign Director Bill Casey, a renowned Wall Street buccaneer, been left there rather than given the CIA as spoils. Jimmy Carter's sad history might have been different had he kept his campaign strategist Hamilton Jordan out of the White House loop. And John Mitchell, Richard Nixon...
Like Jim Lebenthal and Charles Schwab, Randy Smith owns a successful securities firm. But unlike those two familiar financial pitchmen, the head of Manhattan's R.D. Smith & Co. would never think of hawking his services on TV. Reason: R.D. Smith deals in stocks and bonds that would seem far too risky to the typical investor...
Everything Cosby touches these days seems to turn to gold, if not platinum. Enjoying the highest Q rating in history (the definitive show-biz gauge of audience appeal), Cosby has long been one of TV's most sought-after commercial pitchmen; he currently does ads for Jell-O, Kodak and E.F. Hutton. His stand- up performances draw packed crowds everywhere, from the showrooms of Las Vegas to Radio City Music Hall. (His going rate for one-nighters: $250,000.) A videocassette, Bill Cosby: 49, sponsored by Kodak and produced by Cosby's wife Camille, has sold 200,000 copies...
Much of that money has gone for television commercials in a kind of surrogate Battle of the Long-Distance Pitchmen. AT&T employed Actor Cliff Robertson, who had earned a reputation for scrupulous honesty by blowing the whistle on a 1977 Hollywood embezzlement scandal, for a reported salary of $2 million a year. MCI riposted with Burt Lancaster and Comic Joan Rivers. Sprint was represented for a time by Psychologist Joyce Brothers. The campaign has also extended beyond the airwaves to local shopping malls and amusement parks, where the rival long-distance suppliers have even hired acrobats and clowns...