Ballyhoo (Mar 23, 1956)

Page scan 00015 from Ballyhoo

Record Details:

Title:
Ballyhoo
Date:
Mar 23, 1956
Volume:
Ballyhoo (Mar 23, 1956) National
Leaf #:
00015
Language:
English
Collection:
Canada, Global Cinema, and Hollywood Studio System
Format:
Periodicals
Contributor:
Media History Digital Library, Greig Dymond in memory of David Dymond, Paul Moore and Jessica Whitehead
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:

Ballyhoo

  • Ontario 'B' District Ballyhoo, editor: Dan Krendel (1952-55)
  • Profit Blitz for ‘Fitz’, editor: Dan Krendel (1955)
  • National Ballyhoo, editor: Dan Krendel (1956-57)
  • Time Out for Ticket Talk, editor: Norman Barker (1960-61)

Ballyhoo (1952-61) was published by Famous Players Canadian Corporation as a mimeographed internal sales and theatre managers’ newsletter. Editor, Dan Krendel, had been division manager of the Ontario ‘B’ District since 1942, and initially created Ballyhoo in 1952 to circulate weekly updates for a regional sales contest. Ontario ‘B’ District Ballyhoo continued until 1955 as a tool for sharing and incentivizing new sales techniques and publicity methods as the movie business declined in the face of television and the baby boom.

In Fall 1955, Profit Blitz for ‘Fitz’ was a nationwide sales contest, named for Famous Players’ president J. J. Fitzgibbons, honouring his 25th year as head of the business. Dan Krendel was made National Drive Captain and edited a weekly newsletter for the campaign.

From 1956 until at least 1957, National Ballyhoo was published weekly with Krendel as editor. He continued the style and content developed earlier for his Ontario ‘B’ District, but now extended vastly for a chain-wide coast to coast scale. Ballyhoo’s sharing promotional tools came at a time of contracting box office as television and automobile ownership became prevalent in the mid-1950s.

By 1960 until at least 1961, Time Out for Ticket Talk continued as a mimeographed newsletter, edited by Norman Barker of the head office publicity department. Time Out was compiled on a less ambitious scale than Ballyhoo. Compared to the earlier national compilation of local publicity gimmicks, Time Out often contained only a single memo or reproduced local story, and was often undated and only informally edited.

– Paul Moore, March 2024

Date Added:
April 11, 2024
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CAPITOL ~NORTH BAY Well, waddaya know ... Harvey's finally in. Wonder if my trip up North had anything to do with it? I see that the local Home Furnishing Company came through with a full window display on SINCERELY YOURS. Good art and some pretty snappy copy. Bob had a cute stunt figured for ARTISTS AND MODELS, but the weather turned cold and made it impossible for his gals to parade the main street in artists! smocks. So ... they did parade around, in fur coats, and carrying oversize easels with good sales copy for the pic. The Singer Sewing Machine Co. had a comely model in their window, sewing patterns on pieces of material, with copy proclaiming, "Sew clothes fit for a NODEL on a Singer ..." The window was loaded with good advertising accessories, Both Bannon Brothers and Halliday's Hardware put in full window displays ... the former tying in on the music, and the latter on T.V. sets, O.K, boy ... this is a start ... Now let's have some of those old fashioned full-coverage merchandising campaigns you became sorta famous for a while back ... huh? eX eX eXeXeXeo CAPITOL CALGARY Ralph Mitcheltree followed a slightly different tack in his selling of TROUBLE WITH HARRY. He spotted several cleverly written teasers throughout the leading daily for several days in advance ... and also used the same type of copy for spot radio announcements. He played up the comedy angle throughout, and tells me it really paid off at the B.O. That's what we mean by not being afraid to be a little different on occasion, Ralph runs an occasional sneak preview, and hasn't been too happy with the results ... so he figured it this way ... Spotting a one sheet in front of the theatre on the day he plays the picture doesn't give his customers much of a chance to know about it ... and his newspaper ad and trailer also fail to reach the greatest proportion of his audience, So he changed his tactics, The last time he ran a sneak, he advertised it in exactly the same way as he would any big attraction ... omitting of course, the title. He advertised it on his screen well in advance ... He used teaser ads ... He loaded his lobby with good catchy copy ... In short, he really sold the deal, but good. And, do you know what the results were? Well ... in 15 below weather he completely sold out his house ... the first time since he started the sneaks. This must be the proper formula fellows ... and if you have any sneak previews coming up ... how about doing a real selling job, like Ralph did, instead of just taking the easy way out? It'll sell tickets for you ..,. believe me,