Monday, March 11, 2024
Selling It: The Heartbreak of Pizza Face
Kleerex was a pimple cream originally manufactured in Canada, but the company crossed the border and set up shop in St. Paul Minnesota to manufacture and market in the U.S.as well. The company seems to have come on the scene in the mid-1920s, and the U.S. arm was active by the end of the decade.
In the 1940s Kleerex hit upon the idea of making comic strip ads, and it must have worked like a charm because they're so often seen they're almost like ... er ... zits on a teenager? Most of the comic ads were black and white affairs for running in weekday papers, but a few Sunday colour ads also extolled the virtues of Kleerex for zapping face invaders.
The comic strip ads from the 1940s plow very familiar ground; that some girl or guy could be a movie star if it just weren't for that darn skin turbulence. Dab on a little Kleerex, and voila, the cartoonist doesn't spray black dots all over your face in the next panel!
So why am I dredging this up? Well, it seems that the cartoonist who drew many of those strips is none orther than Al Papas, who (as you can see above) signed his work on occasion. Papas was an easy find for the Kleerex folks, because he was the sports cartoonist at the Minneapolis Star, right in St. Paul's back yard.
The subject matter might have been a little icky, but Al did a beautiful job on these strips, like the one above that ran in the Detroit News on December 28 1947. But the party didn't last. By 1950 the cartoon ads had disappeared, and a few years later Kleerex stopped advertising in the US altogether. By 1956 they seem to have either gone down the tubes even in Canada, or were advertised through other venues.
Labels: Marketing Madness
: 3/11/2024 11:13 AM 
: 3/11/2024 8:33 PM During this era there was a Clearasil commercial on "American Bandstand". A too-pretty teen couple is enacting "Romeo and Juliet" and the guy is looking down and mumbling his lines. He has two or three red specs on his unpainted visage. Voiceover: "I was the lead in the class play ... and all I could think about was everybody staring at my unsightly acne blemishes." Didn't those advertising guys know any actual theater kids? My face and back could be erupting like Vesuvius, but I'd give a performance!
Comic strip ads in the newspaper ... very rare in my memory. Comic strip ads in actual comic books, on the other hand, were reasonably common. The much-parodied Charles Atlas was evidently successful enough to run constantly, and DC had odd public service ads (Superman denouncing prejudice as unpatriotic, Miss America revealing that girls like her go for non-smokers, etc.). Also, for some reason, trade school ads. Somebody figured this was the medium and format to reach adults in need of career guidance. But no acne comic strips. Just the occasional offer of a blackhead extractor.
: 3/12/2024 7:45 PM 