Ballyhoo (Nov 9, 1956)

Page scan 0009 from Ballyhoo

Record Details:

Title:
Ballyhoo
Date:
Nov 9, 1956
Volume:
Ballyhoo (Nov 9, 1956) National
Leaf #:
0009
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.

SPECIAL TREATMENT IN SELLING Jimmy Nairn emphasized the special campaigns so very carefully prepared by his department on what we have come to think of as 'Blockbusters! in our product line-up, Attractions such as WAR AND PEACE and THE TEN COMMANDMENTS can!t be properly sold by a routine ad in your newspaper and some standard display accessories on your front. Our publicity department develops a special type of campaign which each theatre must adhere to ... and to help you with your selling job, the special field men assigned to these pictures will visit with you and help in the advance preparations. Their time is limited ... they have many, many theatres to cover, and it is therefore important that you are ready for them when they hit your town .e. have all the information they require at your finger tips ee. co-operate with them to the very fullest degree. On the subject of service, Jimmy advised that his department still has a number of copies of our Service Manual available. oXoXeXeXoXeo "Sometimes we treat the pictures which reach us as if they were cubes of ice ... they are !just motion pictures! ...Well, those motion pictures are our Life's Blood, and we can't properly sell them unless we ourselves are completely and genuinely enthusiastic," Onetediaiine oXeXeXoXoXe GREAT PRODUCT REQUIRES GREATER SELLING "With the really great line-up of product being made available to us" stated Rube Bolstad ... "Such as GIANT ... OKLAHOMA in Cinema-~ Scope, and of course WAR AND PEACE and TEN COMMANDMENTS, we have a wonderful chance to repeat the terrific job we did when we first introduced CinemaScope to our customers. We'll never get a better opportunity to attract that so-called 'Lost Audience! back into our theatres. This is the kind of a challenge that requires the ultimate in selling activity ... the type of selling you can really sink your teeth into," Mr. Bolstad in commenting on the trend of our business stated that while our dollar sales are higher than they were in 1949 and 1950 «se. we were selling fewer tickets, and this in spite of the phenomenal growth in our population. "We can do two things to correct that situation ..«. really SELL the great attractions available to us, and learn to manage our business with greater care and more efficiency, so that we may retain a greater portion of each ticket sale and in that way increase our profits." "We must concentrate on building up our juvenile and teenage business, They are the adult ticket purchasers of the future, and if we help build the movie habit now, we will reap the benefits in the future,"