Monday, November 2, 2009

Advertising news at its very second best.


If you grew up in New York, if you were a kid and a sports fan in the 50s and 60s, you grew up with Marty Glickman announcing the Knicks. The Knicks games at the time were sponsored by a chain of restaurants called Nedick's. And Glickman would say after a Knicks bucket "Good! Like Nedicks." This was a phrase you still heard when I was a kid in the 70s, especially if you hung around with some older kids. Often Glickman's phrase would be shortened to "Nedicks!" So if you were playing basketball and one of these older guys hit a basket, there was a good chance he would exclaim "Nedicks!"

Earlier today I read in Stuart Elliot's ad column in The New York Times that owing to our rotten economy, marketers are engaged in "broth wars." People are eating more soup and marketers are spending ad dollars going after a larger "share of bowl" or some such. Even Manischewitz is getting into the act. And in the process they are using once again their iconic slogan "Man-O-Manischewitz." A phrase that came in handy in the days before you were allowed to curse publicly or in front of your parents.

Then, of course, there were the radio ads that used to play on WQXR in New York that featured Allan Swift as the "beloved herring maven." Often those commercials would end with this fractured rhyme "“Make your life a little bit brighter, eat a little herring by Vita."

Man-O-Manischewitz.

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