But Wait! There’s More…
We have all seen this great line on late night tv and it must work because it has
been around forever. Whenever I see it, I am taken back to a time long past.
When I was in high school, there was a kid in our group named Buzz. I don’t remember
what his real name was, or maybe I never knew. At any rate, Buzz was a pitchman’s
dream.
He fell for any story anyone ever told him, no matter how ridiculous or far-fetched.
All you had to do to get him was say “Wait! I tell you what I’m gonna do…” and Buzz
was all ears.
At carnival time we couldn’t keep him away from the carnie pitchmen. On the rare
occasion when he would pass by one without playing the game, we would hear the magic
words: “Wait, I tell you what I’m gonna do” and Buzz would turn around and walk
back to hear the pitch. And every time, he would come back minus his money.
I remember we used to stay up late on weekends playing poker and listening to a
Spanish language radio station that came in from Ciudad Acuna, just across the Rio
Grande river from Del Rio, Texas. They blasted the airwaves with a couple of gazillion
watts of power that must have reached all the way to Canada. And they played great
rock and roll.
Anyway, they sometimes ran ads in English for some of the strangest products you
could imagine. One of these was a bug killer that was guaranteed to kill any bug.
For some reason, this fascinated Buzz. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. We all
teased him unmercifully about it, but it only made him more determined to try it
out.
On the day the package arrived from Mexico, we all gathered around to see what it
was. Inside the package there were two blocks of wood marked ‘A’ and ‘B’. The instructions
read “Place bug on block A and mash firmly with block B.”
We have all probably fallen for such pitches at one time or another. The popularity
of late-night TV shows pitching everything from vegetable slicers and blankets with
sleeves to hands free phone jacks for your car, shows that we have not changed at
all when it comes to marketing. As long as the price is “only 19.95” we will go
for it, even though we have all seen the pitch before. And the hook is always the
same:
But Wait! There’s More…
(Got a favorite pitch story? Share it with us!)
About the author
Will Moore is Internet Marketing Specialist at W Moore & Co, Inc, an Internet Marketing
and e-business development firm. You may contact him at
Moore & Co, Inc. Copyright 2009 by WG Moore
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