About a month ago when I found out that I could add clips to the new site, I went in search of old copier ads. I found quite a few of them, however I’m thinking that most of the old ads maybe lost forever since they were never scanned. (If anyone has any old dealer magazines lying around please see if you can scan some of those old ads and upload them here).
The glamor and the sizzle of a big TV, Sports or Movie Star can go a long way with promoting a product or a brand for companies. Copier companies back in the seventies and eighties incorporated many these celebrities to promote their products. One celebrity that comes to mind is Tony Randall, Tony was signed on from the hot series the Odd Couple to pitch copiers for Minolta (only from the mind of Minolta). In the meantime Canon had hired Jack Klugman (the other part of the odd couple) to pitch its personal line of copiers. I remember these ads well, every time I saw Jack pitching the Canon personal copier I cringed because the price of the copier was unbelievable compared to what we were selling at the time. Little did we know that the image cartridge that Canon developed for this system would change the way we did business forever. Here’s an interesting paragraph I pulled from the web about that Duo Ad Campaign:
CELEBRITY ADS can backfire if a competitor turns a star’s image to its own advantage. Canon USA, whose personal copier line Jack Klugman has represented since 1982, has fallen victim to this counterploy. In his most recent major TV role Klugman played Quincy, a nice-guy medical examiner of unquestioned integrity. Though perhaps irrelevant to Canon copiers, the image was at least positive. Then Minolta, needing to make the most of an ad budget that its ad agency says was a third of Canon’s, hired Tony Randall as spokesman for its copiers last year. The two actors were featured in the long-running TV series The Odd Couple, reruns of which are still popular in many cities, with Randall playing a compulsive neatnik and Klugman an inveterate slob. The Minolta ads, which according to his agent riled Klugman, played up the Odd Couple stereotypes and even made a thinly veiled reference to Klugman when Randall ad-libbed, ”Of course, I’m not a slob like, uh . . .” and gave his you-know-who-I-mean look. Minolta’s marketing coup was to associate Canon machines in consumers’ minds with Klugman’s mess: jammed paper, perhaps, or ink-blackened hands. A performer’s success in one campaign may reduce his chances of success in another.
One of the old copier names that comes to mind is Apeco. We posted a few of these ads that show Arnold Palmer preparing for a put with the tag line “the copymaker that never needs a “mulligan” either… meaning you’re always going to get a copy and you never have to make a do over. In another ad for the Apeco Super Stat ultra, Arnie is pictured finishing a swing with the tag line of “we’ve taken the oops out of copy making”. All in all it brings us back to a time when not all copiers had the same reliability factor and some copiers were downright horrible to operate!
In another ad for Canon, “Sweetness,” Walter Payton pitches Canon copiers. You can go here to check it out for yourself.
“The Mad Duck” aka Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions also pitched copier for Apeco. In his ad he can be seen in 1971 lumbering over a console Apeco with the tag line of “Tackles Your Big Copymaking Jobs and brings down your costs”. Hmmmm seems like lowering your costs has always been a key factor when deciding about which copier you’re going to buy.
Bob Seagren was an American pole vaulter, the 1968 Olympic champion. He can been seen in a TV commercial for 3M.
One of the ads that I can’t find is with Tony Randall when he was pitching the worlds first zoom lens copier from Minolta. At one time there was a youtube video of Tony pitching the Minolta, but just a quick searched turned up this and this youtube video with a scrooge theme.
I haven’t seen or can’t remember a celebrity that has pitched a copier/MFP in recent years, but was just thinking that Eric Snowden may be a good pitchman for copier security commercials! Eric seems to be the man without a country, whether you like or dislike what Eric did he probably should have thought the whole thing through a couple of times.
If you’ve got any copier ads with or without pitch men, please scan them and upload them here. At least we can try and save what may be lost forever. By the way you can go here for the clip section.
Good selling!
