Radio showmanship (Sept 1940-May 1941)

On a Good Show KAUFMAN, Master Showman and Business Writer, who Explains Ingredients That Make a Successful Show Make a Successful Sale of professional showmanship extract millions daily from the spending public. If you were inclined to question whether showmanship Pays, you need only contemplate the extent to which the public pays, gladly, for showmanship. The total runs to millions of dollars daily. And an important part of this gross is the million dollars a week (conservatively) that advertisers pay to radio stations for the privilege of taking a ride on this sure-shot center of public interest. In every city there are advertisers who will tell you that they have tried radio and that it doesn't work. Of them, I would simply say that they probably tried to ride the radio bandwagon with about the same amount of cooperation and effort as the fat boy who complained that he had bought the book on reducing and had had it on the shelf for a week and still hadn't lost a pound. He said the book was "no good." For a parallel consider the following: The Bell Telephone system has many billions of dollars invested in wires, poles, switchboards and instruments. When you reach for your telephone either at home or in the office, all of these billions of dollars of investment are at your disposal. In any phone booth you are liable to see a sign that tells you that the instrument before you connects with seventeen million telephones. Yet when you drop your nickel into the slot, there is no guarantee that you get your money's worth unless you say the right thing. It all depends on what you say. Or in the case of a radio campaign, to put it more bluntly, it may depend on how good a show you put on in your merchandising as well as in your program. By now I can hear some reader asking, "What is showmanship?" It may seem silly for me to be unable to answer this question, but although I have written two books on showmanship, have spoken on it before a quarter of a million people, I still don't have a practical defini Zenn Kaufman is half man, half showmanship. To some million and half advertising clubs, Rotary clubs, sales managers, chamber of commerce members before whom he has appeared, Kaufman personifies modern merchandising methods. His book, ''Showmanship in Business," written in collaboration with Kenneth Goode, was a best seller; "How to Run Better Sales Contest," set a record, as did "Profitable Showmanship." Christened Xenophon, after the famed Athenian historian and general, Kaufman, by a method all his own, changed it to Zenn when he entered the advertising profession. Still in his thirties, slim, mustached, bespectacled Kaufman is single, lives York, takes his glasses off when posing for pictures. tion. The word is not defined in the dictionary. Mr. Webster simply says, "Showmanship— A Noun." One of my radio friends facetiously defines it as the paper pantie on the lamb chop. We might be like the little girl who defines salt as "The thing that makes the potatoes taste so bad if you leave it out," and say that showmanship is the thing that makes business bad if you leave it out. However, although we don't have a concise definition, we do have a pretty good idea of what showmanship does — and how it does it — and by analyzing the ingredients that make a successful show, we will soon find that those same ingredients make a successful sale — whether in a spot announcement, a (Please turn to page 78) OCTOBER, 1940 47