How would you like to win a new car just by purchasing a common household product, like a bar of soap? Or… even by not purchasing a product at all, instead just filling out a form and mailing it to some faraway place? In past decades, it was tough to pick up a magazine and not find some sort of sweepstakes, contest or other promotional giveaway. And many of those contests featured cars as their grand prizes, which makes them great fun for car enthusiasts to peruse decades later.
I remember as a kid occasionally pleading with my parents to enter these types of sweepstakes. Sometimes they’d agree, usually if I did all the paperwork, which I happily agreed to do. Then I’d daydream of mom driving a new Cadillac or something instead of that crummy old Buick. Like most people, I never won. Sweepstakes like this had a Golden Age, in the 1960s and ’70s when such contests peaked in both popularity and the excitement they generated. These ads are enjoyable to look at, not just for the automotive content, but also as a window into people’s minds at a particular time. We’re featuring here 18 sweepstakes from the 1930s up to the present day, and in all cases, one of the prizes was a car or truck.
As they say, No Purchase Is Necessary! So sit back, relax, and think how great it would be to win a two yellow Pacers!
Contests have existed as long as commerce itself, but this 1937 Procter & Gamble promotion set the stage for decades of ads modeled on a similar concept: Advertise common household merchandise by tantalizing customers with the chance to win aspirational products, such as cars. Or in this case, a car (Ford V-8 Tudor sedan) along with a 19-ft. travel trailer (made by the Covered Wagon Company).
All one needed to do was to purchase three Camay soap bars, and then send wrappers, along with a brief explanation of “Why I like Camay better than any other beauty soap” to Procter & Gamble’s Cincinnati headquarters. This promotion was heavily advertised in newspapers and magazines nationwide, and the 25 grand prize winners were announced on the radio soap opera Pepper Young’s Family over the course of a week in June 1937. To prove the contest’s authenticity, Procter & Gamble ran ads the next month naming all 25 winners, and advising that the additional 300 cash prize recipients have been notified of their winnings by mail.
After taking a break during World War II, contests bounced back. This ad, found in a 1950 Life magazine, promoted Columbia Mills window shades and followed a similar approach as the Camay ad. Customers submitted their sales receipts, along with a 25-word statement about how Columbia shades added beauty to their home.
One lucky customer would win a Buick convertible, while 382 others would win cash prizes from $10 to $500. If the grand prize winner was, say, a Ford gal, she could apparently opt for $2,750 cash in lieu of the Buick.
These types of contests were becoming more common, and with that came legal scrutiny. Some states and localities judged such promotions as being forms of gambling, games of chance, or racketeering, and therefore restricted their legality. By the 1960s, most of these heavily-advertised sweepstakes didn’t require entrants to actually purchase their products – that soothed much of the legal problems, but not all. A small industry of firms specializing in sweepstakes administration emerged, and these overseers would discard entrants from jurisdictions that prohibited whatever form of contest was being entered.
Not all sweepstakes had just one grand prize. The lucky winner of this 1952 Mission Beverages contest received three prizes – a 5-acre Southern California orange grove, a pony and cart for your small children… and “for your teenagers,” a Crosley Super Sports.
The Crosley was – to say the least – a curious car for this contest. A diminutive sports car with a high-revving engine, the Super Sports would have been a more likely giveaway for an auto parts supplier advertising in Road & Track than for an orange juice company advertising in general publications like Life.
The ad copy touted the Crosley “for teenagers” and then went on to call the car “Safe and easy for young people to handle. The hit of the teen-age crowd.” I haven’t conducted a full literature review here, but this might be the only time the 1,100-lb. Crosley was ever described as “safe.”
Only about 400 Super Sports were produced, so the winner got a car that’s now considered rare and desirable. Although not quite as desirable as 5 acres of Southern California real estate. As with many of these older sweepstakes, the company running the ad publicized the winners, and in this case the grand prize winner was 54-year-old Ethel Bisbee, a farmer’s wife from Pavillion, Wyoming. No word on what Mrs. Bisbee did with her prizes.
Sometimes the automotive prizes were more suited to the likely contestants. This 1957 contest, circulated in agricultural magazines, offered a Ford Ranchero to the winner of a contest to complete the sentence “Hood Calf Starter paid off for me because…”
For folks who think that actual farmers didn’t long for Rancheros, the product promoters at H.P. Hood & Sons would probably disagree.
Why give away just one car, when you could give away dozens? In late 1960, the Carnation Milk Company advertised this promotion in newspapers and magazines throughout North America. Customers needed to purchase four separate Carnation products, mail the labels, along with their name and address to Carnation… and wait for the good news.
Sixty-one cars were given away – with luxury vehicles like the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, Cadillac Eldorado and Lincoln Continental heading the pack. Way down at the bottom of this long list were some rather unglamorous offerings, such as a Vauxhall Victor, Morris 1000 and Simca Aronde. But still… 61 cars?? How could Carnation possibly see a return on investment from this promotion by selling 25¢ cans of evaporated milk?
Incidentally, this is one of the few sweepstakes I’ve come across that was offered both in the United States and Canada. But Canadian winners had an additional hoop to jump through – before receiving a prize, they must answer the question “Name two or three products Carnation distributes in Canada.” Apparently, games of chance were strictly regulated in much of Canada at the time, but answering this simple question turned Carnation’s Spectacular Sweepstakes into a game of skill!
Carnation heavily publicized the winners, and held ceremonies to present the lucky folks with their new cars. Among the luckiest was 21-year-old James Cherry and his wife Carol from Portsmouth, Virginia, who won the Continental. The Rolls-Royce went to Mrs. Ronald Ingram, a wheat farmer’s wife and mother of six from Quill Lake, Saskatchewan, who chose a $17,500 check in lieu of the Silver Cloud. Mrs. Ingram said of the Rolls-Royce “It’s a beauty, but the money will buy a boat for the family and the children will get an education.”
To me, the most unusual car in this sweepstakes was a Daimler SP-250 – that went to 38-year-old Emile Martel of Buckingham, Quebec.
Sweepstakes in the 1960s garnered considerable attention, so companies found them to be effective product promotions. Diet-Rite Cola was introduced as a healthy soft drink in the early 1960s, and quickly took the lead in the small-but-growing low-calorie soda market.
This sweepstakes, marketed to families, offered an all-expense paid vacation for mom, dad and the kids to the winner’s choice of Hawaii, the Virgin Islands, Bermuda, or any US destination. But more exciting (for some of us) was that the winner was also treated to a new Ford Country Squire wagon. Amusingly, second prize was a Fairlane Squire wagon.
If Ford wagons and families went together in the 1960s, then “super-tuned” Dodge Darts went equally well with young men battling pimples. Clearasil, a skin ointment marketed for acne treatment since 1950, ran this ad in 1968, giving away a Dart tuned by dragstrip legend “Mr. Norm.” This was an effective combination of product and car. After all, few products employed such successfully targeted ads to a specific audience than did acne pharmaceuticals – the companies selling these products certainly knew how to exploit their audiences’ self-consciousness. And Mr. Norm (whose real name was Norm Kraus) was a masterful promoter in his own right, and quickly built a name for himself in the world of high-performance Mopars.
Also notice that no purchase was necessary to participate in this sweepstakes. This increasingly became the norm over the next decade as way to get around restrictive state or local lottery regulations.
Sweepstakes’ ability to bolster public relations was becoming well-recognized, and more companies jumped into the fray. RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company launched its first nationwide sweepstakes in 1970, with a grand prize consisting of a Cadillac DeVille convertible painted in “Winston Red” (likely custom painted, as Cadillac didn’t offer a bright red color that year), along with $20,000 cash.
According to RJ Reynolds, nearly three million people entered the contest. The grand prize winner was 35-year-old Nadine Edwards of Sherrills Ford, North Carolina, just 60 miles from Reynolds’ Winston-Salem headquarters. The tobacco company chose to publicize the prize award, in part because – as one of the firm’s public relations spokesmen said – people had begun questioning whether high-publicity sweepstakes were for real.
Reynolds put on a festival for the whole town of Sherrills Ford – and in the middle of the jamboree sat a giant gift-wrapped “box” containing a Cadillac. After an hour or so of partying, with free smokes (of course), free food (including 200 lbs. of barbecue… it was North Carolina, after all) and live music, an armored truck pulled up… in it was the $20,000 cash portion of the grand prize. When Mrs. Edwards’ name was announced, she screamed. Her husband, evidently, had been notified weeks earlier and kept the good news secret. Upon taking the DeVille for a quick drive, Mrs. Edwards remarked how much bigger the Cadillac was than her Volkswagen.
Incidentally, Mrs. Edwards wasn’t the only winner that day. RJ Reynolds provided a matching DeVille to the owner of the grocery store where Nadine bought her cigarettes.
It’s easy to imagine folks longing over a Cadillac convertible, but… a Pacer? Actually two Pacers. Two yellow Pacers. Yes, that was the First Prize for this 1975 Dial soap ad that ran in numerous magazines oriented to women (this example is from Family Circle).
In some ways this was clever marketing, for a yellow Pacer bears more than a casual resemblance to the soap bar its advertising. But really… did anyone long to have two of these cars in their driveway? Unfortunately, the Dial Corporation didn’t publicize the winner of this sweepstakes like how RJ Reynolds announced theirs, so the (un)lucky receipt of two Pacers seems lost to time.
While women typically comprised a clear majority of sweepstakes entrants, some sweepstakes were marketed to men. This ad for Yukon Jack whiskey appeared in men’s-oriented magazines in late 1977, giving away a Jeep Cherokee Chief.
Yukon Jack is still produced – a modern sweepstakes with a GMC Yukon would be an awfully tempting combination.
For a somewhat milder beverage and a more obscure truck, we have this 1978 RC Cola sweepstakes where the grand prize winner got to drive away with a Datsun Li’l Hustler Stretch (which is what Datsun called its compact pickup with a 7½’ bed).
Incidentally, the small print at the bottom notes the contest was “void in Missouri, Maryland where prohibited, and wherever else prohibited by law.” Laws restricting sweepstakes gradually peeled away as the contests themselves became evermore commonplace, but there were some holdouts.
Missouri declared sweepstakes to be lotteries, which were prohibited. Though lotteries were defined as including “consideration” (i.e., payment), Missouri’s attorney general determined, and the state’s Supreme Court upheld, that the postage required to mail these sweepstakes entries consisted of payment… therefore such sweepstakes were banned in the Show-Me State. Sweepstakes fans were annoyed, and eventually got a constitutional amendment on the 1978 statewide ballot to allow sweepstakes. It passed by a 2-to-1 margin.
This is perhaps my favorite of these sweepstakes ads – a 1979 “Subaru Brat Sweepstakes” that poses a remarkably kid-unfriendly car (plastic seats mounted backwards in the bed?) with… kids. Lots of kids. Did a family ever buy one of these?
Granted the kids may be more interested in the Mini Brats being given away… actual gas-powered Mini-Brat go-carts. The fiberglass-bodied Mini-Brats were powered by 3½-hp Briggs & Stratton engines, and with some creativity, could fit in a Big Brat’s bed. The contest was entered directly at Subaru dealers, many of whom promoted this extensively, often with the Mini-Brats as a major draw.
Hundreds of Mini-Brats were awarded, along with three full-size Brats (Subaru claimed the contest produced 339,000 entries, which is some healthy showroom traffic). And at least one of the grand-prize contest winners did, in fact, have kids – Rick Trant of Oxford, Mississippi happily picked one up at his local Subaru dealer, and posed for a picture with his wife… and his kids in the bed.
Tennis players often appeared in 1970s and ’80s car brochures… now here’s a sweepstakes that combines tennis with win-a-car contests. According to the text here, Cadillac was a “sponsor of the prestigious 1983 Wimbledon telecast on NBC-TV” (which likely just meant they ran a lot of ads during the matches). Naturally, Cadillac’s Win at Wimbledon contest commemorated this sponsorship. A white (of course) bustleback Seville would be awarded to a lucky entrant who correctly predicted the male and female singles champions on the grass courts that year.
And in case you’re curious, John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova won the 1983 men’s and women’s singles championships.
From tennis to baseball. Gillette ran this “World Series Bonanza” in 1983, though there wasn’t much connection to baseball other than the ads. This wasn’t a mail-in contest, but rather customers could find entry forms in stores “wherever Gillette products are sold,” with the company giving away ten Pontiac Trans Ams and 1,000 Atari computers.
We all know that car magazines weren’t biased at all towards products sold by their advertisers [sarcasm], so I’m sure this Motor Trend sweepstakes giving away a Mustang GT convertible was perfectly above-board. Upon entry, readers could either check the box indicating they’d want a 1-year subscription, or check the “No, I don’t want to subscribe at this time” option. Somehow, I suspect checking that latter box, and mailing the entry form to Sweepstakes Headquarters would be a waste of a 22¢ stamp.
As fun as it might have been to connect the lines between something ordinary like a magazine subscription and something special like a new Mustang, the concept of sweepstakes got a bit stale during the 1980s. In some respects, sweepstakes had become victims of their own success – they were now so commonplace that they’d lost the sparkle that got people excited about them decades earlier. Additionally, people felt virtually inundated by similar promotions from big magazine promoters such as Publishers Clearing House. Many states and even the US Congress launched investigations into the companies that administered these sweepstakes, and although the results were often little more than warnings for consumers to be cautious, sweepstakes’ appeal was fading.
Throughout the 1990s, sweepstakes slowly receded. Of course, such ads did not disappear entirely. The above 1999 ad represents a time when the Sweepstakes Era and the Dot-com Bubble overlapped, with Tunes.com giving away one of five new cars or trucks of the customer’s choice. It’s unclear whether this promotion gave away just one car or several, but it’s interesting to see what marketers selling to young adults in the late 1990s thought their customers’ preferred vehicles would be.
Sweepstakes magazine ads continue to this day, though rarely in the high-profile manner of the past. Today’s examples tend to be lower-key and found in publications with more limited distribution. The above ads are representative – a Tesla for customers of organic superfoods, and a Bronco for Lucky Strike cigarette smokers. Incidentally, Lucky Strike is now sold by RJ Reynolds… it’s a safe bet that the ceremony to present a Bronco to this contest’s winner will be a bit less extravagant that Reynolds’ 1970 Cadillac ceremony.
Maybe big sweepstakes promotions that generate millions of entries, highly publicized awards ceremonies, and lead countless people to daydream about winning a new car will return. In the meantime, we can always enjoy these gems from previous decades. And I’d still love to know who won those Pacers!
Eric, what a a great post! (and what a lot of work in putting it all together!!)
I am pretty sure that there was a week or so back in 1975 where 14 year old me spent more time than I probably should have in the soap aisle at Safeway/Giant/Grand Union plowing through bars of soap with my entry stub. To no avail, of course. Bummer.
I love all of your examples, but I have to say that the one that really captures my attention is the Mission Orange soda prize of the “pony and cart”. Imagine giving away a HORSE? Like some kid in NYC wins and a delivery truck pulls up to his/her parents’ building to deliver a HORSE? Crazy. (about as crazy as the kid ordering their own “pet” monkey by mail…but that happened too) Sounds like a plot right out of Leave it to Beaver. (“Well, me and Lumpy thought…”)
I think that one of the other things that killed print ad sweepstakes (beyond and conflated with the decline of print advertising) was the fact that they become harder to promote when you can’t write more than a few words in the print ad. Notice that even the 90s-era Wimbledon sweepstakes still had many many more words in the ad copy itself (not just the contest fine print) than we’d ever expect humans to read nowadays. Our post-text-literate society has resulted in the loss of lots of things, and I’d venture that loss of sweepstakes is one of those things.
“Like some kid in NYC wins and a delivery truck pulls up to his/her parents’ building to deliver a HORSE?”
Or those same parents winning an orange grove. “Honey, go buy some gloves because we’re moving to California to grow oranges.” This could have been a plot on The Honeymooners. 🙂
I actually had an aunt and uncle who won a contest where the prize was a pony. They lived in a small town and stabled it at the local fairgrounds for awhile. We kids thought it was cool when Uncle Bob took us to go ride the pony, but my aunt later described owning that stupid pony as one of the worst episodes of her life.
“episodes”
Life imitates art, or vice a versa. 🙂
That phenomenon was striking to me as well. At a certain point in time, ad text just disappeared.
There’s a lot of factors that went into these types of sweepstakes losing appeal, but another aspect was that overall, there’s just more gambling and lotteries these days. Decades ago, most US states didn’t have lotteries, and casinos were confined to just a few places. Now both are seemingly everywhere.
Sweepstakes captured people’s imagination in a way that other activities do now.
The pony giveaways back in the 1950s are hilarious (or shocking, depending on your viewpoint) by today’s standards. One of my daughters read this article last night before it was published, and that was the main thing that jumped out at her — “Who would be able to own a pony??” I shudder to think what actually happened to those ponies that were given away in 1950s ads. Most probably devolved into stories like JPC’s aunt and uncle below.
Did the fact that prizes were considered income in most states hence taxable cause the decline of car give aways?. ” Car n $10000 in the trunk” l The money to pay IRS
Many times as a young kid in the late 60’s, flipping through magazines, I would see the cardboard inserts. I would tear them out and fill in my information. Hey, I was a kid and filling in the blanks was something cool! I somehow learned that “No Postage Necessary” meant I didn’t have to ask mom for a stamp and didn’t need her advice in such matters. Who knows what I was filling out! Although I never won a prize, we did have salesmen show us occasionally wanting to sell us random things!
I am fascinated by these car giveaway contests. An interesting subset of them is in your lead photo with the Pacer giveaway. Here is an earlier example of the same thing – the lucky buyer of laundry starch could win a pair of Studebaker Larks.
I understand a manufacturer of consumer products who wants to generate a buzz by giving away a really glamourous and desirable car like a Cadillac convertible. But why would a company pick a little niche vehicle with limited appeal for a giveaway? How much more would it have cost to give away two, say, Chevy Impalas or for the same money two really popular Ford Falcons? The Pacer was at least kind of cool in its first year. There was probably some kind of contribution by the car manufacturer in underwriting the whole thing to get its car out into the public eye.
I just realized that the woman in front of the red Lark wagon is doing Toyota’s “Oh what a feeling” ad… long before it was a thing!
I’m sure that’s exactly what it is. An early(ish) form of product placement…much like Fords in Quinn Martin Productions, and such. But more complicated since here the cars, or the idea of getting a “free” car, are more about encouraging you to go buy soap, fabric softener, soda, etc. I suppose that the car manufacturers and the other consumer product manufacturers thought that it was a win-win situation for them both.
I like the opening line of this ad:
“Win the keys of ownership to both of these beautiful dream cars, and treat your family to a thrill they’ll never forget.”
More complimentary prose couldn’t have been written by Studebaker’s own ad team!
Also, these folks had to actually work for their prizes… it’s neat to come across ads like this where entrants are required to finish song lyrics about the product. Here’s the guidance from the Sta-Flo contest:
Sta-Puf and Sta-Flo can’t be beat,
For keeping laundry soft and neat,
Try them once and you will see…
___________________________
(Be sure last line rhymes with “see”)
Unfortunately, these companies never seemed to reveal just what the winners actually wrote to win the big prizes. I’d love to know.
Last line: “Studey A and Studey B!”
Or
“A stiff as cardboard fam-i-lee!”
That kind of jingle demands an exclamation point at the end. Now where are my two new Studebakers?
Wow, you’re good. For that you’d at least get a Toastmaster iron!
Turns out the ran ads for this sweepstakes with another jingle too (and a romantic, quasi-kissing Studebaker couple picture).
For laundry magic at its best,
Make the Sta-Flo / Sta-Puf test,
Just one trial and you’ll agree…
___________________________
(Be sure last line rhymes with “agree”)
…L.S.; L.S.M.F.T!
Oh, wait.
And drive away in a Studie-B!
or
Just stay the hell away from me!
I don’t think I’m winning a car with these.
For laundry magic at its best,
Make the Sta-Flo / Sta-Puf test,
Just one trial and you’ll agree…
That the Studeys here are best just left to JPC…!
At one point in 1958 Edsels were so heavily offered as contest prizes that it was joked the first thing two Edsel owners asked each other when they met was “How did you win yours?”
History repeated itself with the Pontiac Aztek which seems to have been given away any time a promotional prize car was called for in the year 2000.
Once read that Edsels were so unpopular that when owners meet up the questions was along ” Which competition did you win yours from? “…
The weirdest contest was Nash’s attempt to boost the debut of the Metropolitan. They assembled a special sports roadster edition of the Met. If you submitted the winning entry, this roadster would be awarded…. not to you, but to baseball star Ted Williams.
Why bother to enter a contest so a rich asshole can receive a car that he could easily buy? In the end Williams did receive the car, then immediately violated the terms of the contract by selling it to another rich asshole.
That is a strange premise. I would think a lot of folks would have been cynical enough to assume this was just a PR stunt and it was preordained the Mr. Williams would get the car regardless of any “winning entry”.
According to Hemmings it was a Nash-Healey, and sponsored by Johnson Wax. The prize winner did get a trip to the World Series (for six!) as did several runners-up with diminishing numbers in the party at each level.
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/article/nash-healeys-you-never-knew
Very nice article indeed. Always a joy to read something related to culture, habits etc here in CC.
Thank you for this. You undoubtedly spent a long time researching this.
The 1961 Carnation contest sticks out for me. Of course, by 1961 I am not sure calling a DeSoto (one of the 61 cars) glamorous would have been considered accurate or not. However, reading this list, they were quite comprehensive in what they were offering to give away.
I do hope Mr. and Mrs. Cherry had a fruitful relationship with their Lincoln.
Seeing the contest for RC Cola and Diet Rite (made by RC) is rather sad, given RC’s rapid decline during the 1980s. I drank a lot of RC while growing up.
Totally, re. the Diet Rite. I still recall those 6 bottle cardboard carriers with the stripes as picking that from the supermarket shelf and bringing it to the cart was one of my tasks in helping my mom shop. Diet Rite was her brand. But unlike the kid in the ad – that’s my fantasy family from the second half of the 1960s, by the way – I’d never have had a bottle to drink like that kid. My mom held the position that saccharin was “bad for kids”. And thus I had to have regular RC or Coke on those rare occasions when a soft drink was allowed. “Bad for kids” but apparently good for adults, like coffee. Something that perplexed me considerably as a youth.
Mom did not allow caffeine in the house, she drank Sanka. So, I collected empty bottles on the beach and went to Safeway to trade them in on an RC. Why RC? 16oz bottle for the same price as a 12oz Pepsi or even smaller Coke.
I love RC, it’s my cola of choice when there is a choice. We went to a brewpub last week in the Desert Southwest and my daughter ordered a Diet Pepsi, the waitress asked if Diet Rite would be ok instead? I was quite surprised to see it on tap there.
@ Jim :
RC Cola, like Vernors or MOXIE, is an acquired taste .
I too like RC Cola but only for a while then I drift back to Pepsi .
RC is often the cheapest brand of cola in supermarkets, my foster boys asked me about it last week when we were in Las Vegas avoiding the flooding .
-Nate
I think I see it so rarely in fountain form that when it’s there I have to have it to enjoy it and then it’s a long while before it’s available again…It’s a welcome change from the juggernauts of C + P.
Strangely enough, I saw a Pacer just a few weeks ago. Back in the day, I thought they looked refreshingly clean compared to many of the domestics.
Right through my childhood, newspapers in Canada offered a national magazine with the big Saturday paper. There were two, Canadian Magazine and Weekend Magazine,
offered by competing broadsheets. At one point they merged and became Today Magazine, which died out around 1981.
In any case, around 1974 one of them had a contest where the prize was an AMC Hornet.
The lady who won was quoted as saying something like “This is great! My Toyota has 46,000 miles on it, so I was really due for a new car!”
The cars that might not have been glamorous would still be appealing to the folks that entered the contest. Some people were likely appreciative of Dial offering a new economy car, Not everyone would want or be able to make use of a high operating cost car like a Cadillac. So, the definition of desirable would be self selected by the contest entrants.
When I worked at a grocery store while in high school, one of the older cashiers won a sports car from the local department store next door. It was about as useful as a horse to her, her ’74 Plymouth Sebring coupe fit her kids, stomach for taxes and insurance, and was paid for.
Her husband really wanted to keep the sports car, and what should have been a happy circumstance turned kind of dark for them. I was never very clear how the issue got settled.
When I was working at L.A.P.D. Air Support the grumpy cantankerous woman there was a fanatical contest person ~ she’d fill out cards in the names of everyone who worked with her and said ‘of course I’ll get 50% if you win’ .
Eventually she won a new car, IIRC she took the money instead .
-Nate
First prize = AMC Pacer. Second prize – 2 Pacers!
I’ll take that 84 T/A for sure
TWO yellow AMC Pacers from Dial soap!! Of course if you misspell “Dial” it becomes “DUAL.”
… Sorry about that…!
I enjoyed reading this. Thanks for writing.
I’m also fascinated by the fine print on some of these things. For example, the customer is advised on the Dial Pacer promotion that “Cars subject to normal production availability”. What does that mean?
I guess that since this was the introduction year for the Pacer (1975), there might have been the thought that the car would be so popular that there could be difficulty in obtaining free ones for the contest winner.
Gee, if they held the contest 4 years later, they probably could give each winner 3 or 4 of them as I don’t think Pacers were exactly flying off the lot in that last year of production.
“Cars subject to normal production availability”
Scary thought entering such a contest today! Will you receive your prize or not?
Best story ever – (fiction) – Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”.
Scene: two burglars break in to rob a home of all its furniture. Phone rights and it is “Name That Tune!”. Burglars are so excited to play, and they win the Grand Prize. After they hang up, they finish the job. Owners come home to find their house furniture gone. The next morning, there is a knock on the door, they discover that that they won the Grand Prize, which was brand new furniture! Hilarious and wonderful.
One of the most bizarre ones probably was Dr Pepper’s giveaway of seven Dodge Chargers – “one for every day of the week” – to one winner.
If you’re wondering at what point of diminishing returns a multi-car prize inevitably becomes a burden, that qualifies. You’d need to sell one car immediately to pay taxes on the other six and hope you have enough parking space for the rest while dealing with arranging (and paying!) what would’ve been effectively a car dealership insurance policy while long-lost friends and relatives hard up for transportation came out of the woodwork…ugh. Why not seven winners of one car each?
https://www.streetmusclemag.com/news/video-drink-dr-pepper-and-win-seven-68-chargers/
The opportunity to win a Porsche Carrerra (complete with an extra “r”) in the Carnation contest, along with a spare set of whitewall Goodyear tires is mind-boggling. Even the MGA twin cam would look more appropriate with whitewalls. It wasn’t clear to me exactly how that contest worked; were all the cars given away, so that the 60th person to “win” had to choose between the leftovers, such as the Morris and Simca? Though it’s possible that by 1961 the prospect of a brand new orphan DeSoto would have been even less desirable.
When I was a kid, it wasn’t these big, national contests that got me excited – it was the go-kart giveaways at the local grocery store/auto parts store/gas station/liquor store. Man, I really, really wanted one of those 5 hp Briggs powered, yellow Pepsi liveried Indy cars!
Funny though, our neighbor owned a couple of grocery stores, and his kids had a brand new, yellow, Pepsi liveried Indy car go-kart immediately after one of those contests had ended…
This package of Morton’s salt, still about half full, was in a kitchen cupboard in my grandparents’ home when I bought it in 2009.
What a remarkably lame promotion! If I saw such an amateurish appearing contest/giveaway on a modern package, as 1988 is indeed modern, I’d question whether it is legit. It looks like a stuck-on Avery laser printer label.
I doubt Chrysler would have remotely okayed such a poor rendering of their van. If this was in partnership with them. It looks like a Corel Draw clip art drawing of a Honda City, with a sliding door added.
1988 is 34 years ago. Starting next January 1, someone born in 1988 can be President of the United States. Every kind of graphic design and every printing process was harder and more expensive.
I agree with you that the rendering is lame, but.
I was a graphic designer in 1988. Given they are giving away a new minivan, and I assume this is a national promotion, this is very underwhelming for 1988 or 1978. Or 1968.
Desktop publishing was around since 1984. The earliest versions of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop allowed significantly more design creativity than seen here, printing for packaging, using the four-colour offset printing process.
The design of the Morton packaging with the girl and umbrella was somewhat iconic for them. But dated. They likely wanted to keep the promotion equally low key with simple colours and graphic design. I think another creative lead/art director could have done much better.
Fair points all, and I think your last statement here nails it: if they’d got much fancier with that promotion, it would’ve upstaged the basic package design.
They could have created something significantly more dynamic while respecting the integrity of the brand. While using a simple colour palette. For a national contest promoting a new van giveaway, this is exceptional conservative. Defeating the purpose of the promotion somewhat.
A small example. A simple 3D line art illustration would have been more interesting, than the 2D clip art they used.
But…butbut…but it was the 1980s. Clip art worship was mandatory!
I was in the middle of earning a technical degree in Print Management back when you were a designer and have over 25yrs total of direct and often hands-on print industry experience from age 15 to my early 40s ranging from press operator to large commercial plant manager – that old Morton’s salt package as well as the one I just looked at in my cupboard is 2 color printing (plus MAYBE black for the nutrition information only on the new one, can’t find my lupe and my lighting is too warm and dim here) most likely printed via Flexographic process rather than offset litho and very possibly even in house – in short for it to be 4CP offset litho, let alone gravure, the press would have to be far more expensive and complex both for the additional units as well as the processes for the finer line screens needed/desired. With Flexo you can/could do large solids with minimal relatively low lpi screens (umbrella inside only in the above picture) using only Morton Blue and Morton Yellow, whatever PMS or custom mixed colors they are. The press used was and possibly still is ancient and fed by literally barrels of the two inks without a significant set of controls as would be needed with 4CP to control the greater density variability and tighter fit needed. The press was/is probably fed by rolls of paper, then slit into thinner but still large diameter rolls to be paste applied and chop cut to the cardboard cans of product as they are produced.
The van image COULD in fact be far better designed as you explained, and a 3D rendering would be far better than what was produced at least by today’s aesthetics, but solid line art would still reproduce far better than anything else with what they were likely working with. But digital platemaking didn’t happen until the late 90s, so any changes were hand cut with layers of film and masks. Screens are always far harder to reproduce consistently than solids and in this type of process are best kept to a minimum like in the larger umbrella area seen here. Flexo is fast and cheap once the infrastructure is in place but the simpler the better to keep the print quality consistent.
That’s the most I’ve uttered about printing in at least five years… 🙂
When I worked freelance, I had my own light table, and supply of goldenrod, rubylith, opaque paint, crop mark and crosshair tape, and lithographers tape. And often supplied the prepress filmwork to the printer I dealt with. At least for simpler print jobs. With Cibachromes or quality laser prints as colour break proofs for the printer. It’s been at least 25 years since I’ve touched any of that material.
I still remember having a large collection of Letraset dry transfer lettering typefaces.
You are 100% correct, this is a simple three colour job. And the simpler the colour breaks, and the less fine the linework, the better. Trapping would be much easier as well. While designers may not be impressed by the design work here, it is designed to be very practical for the commercial printer. Definitely a loose registration job, suitable for older printing technology as well.
I ran a couple small Heidelberg presses for a short time in my early career, but preferred the creative process of the design field. It was a huge asset back then to have as much exposure as possible to many facets of the creative and offset printing process. A genuine lost art in many ways. Still nice to drop by commercial printers now and then, and smell the fresh ink.
The fresh ink, yes, and the fountain solution! My own experience was with ancient-even-back-then Multilith 1250s (so old they did not have single-lever control), carbon-arc plateburners, and the likes of Kroytype.
I remember those ‘quick’ printers, and setting up the press all too well!
Thank God we avoided working with all the toxic chemistry of the early days of offset printing in the 1950s and early 60s. Some of the older lithographers I learned from, who preferred being called ‘lithographers’ than pressmen, recalled friends lost early due to working with toxic inks. And especially, the chemicals used to clean the presses. Extremely toxic.
Full-nasty press solvent was still sloshing around in the late ’80s-early ’90s when I was warned not to get “too much of” it on my skin.
Thankfully, that’s when the transition happened. Water-based ink, and biodegradable solutions, with proper training in the handling, and disposal of chemicals.
It was always a treat watching experienced lithographers set up a large press for perfect registration, with minimal paper spoilage. Add in when plates for varnishes, die cuts, and embossing added so much creativity to final printed jobs.
I started out by running a 1960’s vintage Heidelberg KORD single color press at my high school as a 10th grader. And setting type on a Linotype (hot lead slugs!), my second year we got a Compugraphic and output text, pasted it on galleys, shot and developed it and made plates with the carbon arc lights. Washing my hands in the drum of solvent made the ink come off real good. And the skin too…hmm. Then a degree in the field with lots of hands-on at Cal Poly SLO.
Fifteen years later I was directing a plant and work off Heidelberg 641 full UV ink presses (2 of those) with coating towers, an H- 629 and several other presses including starting branching out into the world of HP Indigo digital presses as well as large format in a big way along with a full die and foil shop with folders and gluers for packaging as well. No film to be seen anymore on the print side, all direct to plate, inhouse ink mixing, etc. In the early to middle of the career were some middle management jobs at printers with larger equipment including some web (web print, not web internet) and a longish stint as part founder/ownership of a print brokerage with vendors all over the country and a few times overseas. Lots of work for Apple including all the original iMac printed promo stuff, The Gap, Oracle, FootLocker, Nike, Hal Riney and the other Bay Area ad shops, United Airlines, AmEx, Whole Foods, etc. We printed all the owner’s manuals for the Tesla Roadster along with preproduction stuff for the Model S, they were still down the street in San Carlos at the time. And several years of a one-off leather bound personal day planner for Larry Ellison, that cost Oracle multiple thousands of dollars for something that looked an awful lot like what was sold at Walgreens for $10. We actually produced five, one for Larry, one as a sample for the designer, and one each for my wife and those of my two partners. The incremental additional cost was negligible.
Lots of interesting days, quite a few highs, and several very dismal lows. The glory days of print are well over, pretty glad I’m completely removed from it now.
Really good to know you thrived and succeeded in the printing industry. I wanted to learn as much as I could early in my design career, and send best seamless electronic files out for pre-press, so I went into the printing field for several years. Generally-speaking, I wasn’t fully comfortable with the very bottom-line, and blue-collar nature of the industry. Very male-dominated back then (more than the automotive field), as some of the largest most ‘progressive’ printers still paid women less than men for the same work. Chauvinism was a big problem, especially in press departments. Chased a number of frustrated young women away. Big credit to ladies who stuck with it. Huge competitive pressure among printing companies when quoting, and jobs would be lost on quote differences of a few dollars. When you knew your company would do far better work, than the winning bid. But many clients were clueless, as to how critical it is to remain faithful to quality printers. Printers would substitute cheaper stock, or run jobs on inferior presses. Could be a very tough treacherous field! More cutthroat than the automotive service industry in many ways. Glad you survived intact.
Interestingly, Morton Salt is highlighting their ‘new’ branding on their website. And the graphic design remains conservative.
https://www.mortonsalt.com/article/morton-salt-pours-out-modern-new-look-on-packaging/
I braced for impact before clicking the link, but as brand refreshes go, this one is rather good. Not like UPS’ cock-up, or the even worse clunker at USPS—they took the postal eagle, which was a longrunning, instantly-recogniseable, ideal symbol of accurate, fast flight and the USA, and very, very expensively zoomed in on its beak to result in a logo I can never see any way other than this:
I totally agree. The designers were probably trying hard to be clever, to impress their client.
That triangular “A” in States really bothers me for whatever reason. They’re trying way too hard to be modern.
I love that! And I agree with Daniel M. that the silhouette is amazingly amateurish for a major product. Actually, to me, that silhouette looks more like a Renault Espace than a Caravan.
Look, look! It’s Lever’s “60-Valiant” Sweepstakes! Comes with not one…not two…but three spurious punctuation marks!
We refer to these as the “random” use of quotation “marks” over “here”. 🙂
Otherwise known as “ruoqm”.
…or maybe you’d prefer to try winning one of ten ’60 Valiants with Star-Kist tuna. Don’t think I’ve ever seen “sweepstake” without an s on the end; this makes me wonder about the etymology. I’ve always thought of it as sweep stakes, but could it be sweeps take? Another rabbit hole to get lost in.
I looked it up just now in my unabridged dictionary, and sweepstake is listed as an alternate for sweepstakes, but I’ve certainly never seen it used.
And my dictionary does show the etymology as sweep + stake –s and originating in the 15th century to describe a person who has won all the stakes in a game.
Thanks kindly for sparing me the rabbitwork!
2nd and 3rd prizes—a Lancer not filled with Pepsi—sound better to me.
This here’s a heavy-duty campaign. That $10,000 in 1961 cash is just shy of $100,000 today, and that doesn’t even count the value of the car itself. Neat Lawn-Boy mower there in the lower left corner. I have that Proctor & Silex citrus juicer ($9 at a secondhand store), except mine’s got a chrome upper housing.
To celebrate Canada’s centennial in 1967, Esso Canada (Imperial Oil) commissioned George Barris to customize the Oldsmobile Toronado as a grand prize giveaway for purchases made at Esso gas stations. Four of these Olds, dubbed the ‘Esso 67X’, were given away to prize winners. Barris kept a fifth. Given Barris designed them, the cars were as garish as you’d expect.
It was a major marketing campaign for Esso including print, radio and TV ads.
Gordon Pinsent was featured in the TV ads, and given it was 1967, folk singers were prominent. Winners were announced during intermissions of the highly-rated Hockey Night in Canada.
Very interesting, and it reminded me of my high school sweetie’s mother. She entered virtually every contest going back in the late 50s and well into the 60s. She won numerous cars, ca$h, and sundry other prizes, but her biggest win was a very nice lakeside “cottage” on Whitewater Lake in Wisconsin. IIRC the pontoon boat they had was another prize. 🙂
I suspect her income level easily surpassed her husbands many years!
A Sweepstakes whose winning entry is a pair of Pacers reminds me of the W.C. Fields joke about a trip to Philadelphia: the winner gets a week, the runner-up gets two weeks.
My childhood parish had an annual carnival where the highlight would be the last night raffle of a new Oldsmobile, donated by the local Olds dealer, a wealthy parishioner. In 1961 the Olds Dynamic 88 was won by our good friends and next-door neighbor. It was the most spartan Olds 88 I ever saw, it’s only option being Hydramatic. No radio, black walls and dog dishes.
In the early eighties our neighbor had a stripper Vega, given to them by the wife’s mother, who had won it on The Price is Right. No options whatsoever.
Interesting that they feel the need to qualify that the AMC Pacer was, in fact, a car. In case people couldn’t tell by looking?
They were attempting some word play with the two part headline:
‘Win a pair of AMC Pacer cars.’
‘Just match our Dial bars.’
Enter Dial’s ‘Bars and Cars’ Sweepstakes.
I don’t recall which product – although it may well have been a cereal – was being pitched but for some reason the tag “Win a car a week free, all through ’63” had stuck in my 12 year old mind at the time, and has remained to this day. The power of advertising!
I once entered and won a raffle for a ’91 Chevy Beretta, the ticket was sold by a student intern raising money for her parish. Today with so many scams online, I would have never called back when the nice lady left a message on my answering machine saying I had won, but I did call back and one week later was the proud owner of a maroon ’91 Beretta with absolutely no options except for an auto trans. But I was making payments on a new ’90 GTZ, so now I owned TWO Berettas, one a totally base stripper and the other a fully optioned top of the line sports model. What a difference. I was especially amused at the performance of the 95 hp 2.2L automatic vs the 180 hp 5 speed Quad 4 HO in basically the same car. So I ended up selling the ’91 to help pay for the taxes and make a bigger dent in the car payment of the GTZ.
That’s a great story! I’ve never known anyone who’s won a major prize in a contest.
I haven’t thought of the smell of Dial soap in decades, if not for Eric’s great article. Compared to the overwhelming smell of competitive late 70s deodorant soaps like Irish Spring or Coast, Dial was not offensive. 🙂
Aren’t you glad you use DIAL? Don’t you wish everybody did?
Contemporary with but unrelated to the (mostly) pink machinery Playboy’s playmates of the year would enjoy for a decade-odd, the Tussy Lip Stick Company offered three 1967 Mustangs as prizes for contest winners, each finished in a shade of pink which matched their lip sticks. Nerds will note the three prizes were 1967 models while those displayed in the advertisement were from 1966, the advertising copy printed before Ford lifted the embargo on photographs of the 1967 range.
https://nihilistnotes.blogspot.com/search?q=Pink
You say “nerds”, as if it doesn’t matter, but a differing model year for a vintage car can be a high $$ difference.
Channel 13 in Los Angeles gave away a Subaru 360 every two weeks for about a year. Of course, the joke about second prize being two of them came to mind.
Ran across this. “Donald Trump and the Sweepstakes Scammers
In the eighties, an eclectic group of con artists dominated the market for promotional games, and rigged them—till it all came crashing down.”
(A great many of these sweepstakes were shams!)
https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/donald-trump-and-the-sweepstakes-scammers
That’s a fascinating New Yorker article!
The top prize there – which apparently nearly every distributed gamepiece qualified one for – was a 1990 Dodge Caravan.
https://apnews.com/article/8adab2f6b9ce98f4e565da772e77d4f4
No wonder I saw so many of those vans on the roads back then 🙂
I now understand why I missed this great post the first time around – I was on holiday! So glad you chose this one for year-end “best of”, Eric.
I love the optimism of these contests – just something to hope for! I love the AMC Pacer (and yes, it wasn’t wasted on me that the featured prizes were about the same color as Dial soap). As a kid, though, I would have been crossing fingers, toes, everything to win the miniature Subaru BRAT! That would have been a dream come true, even if the BRAT wasn’t particularly my jam back then. The mini one looked so much like the real thing!
The Dial soap contest is a hoot. First prize should be one Pacer, second prize is two Pacers!
Yes this! Reminds me of the beauty contest where nobody won!
Donno what might’ve been the main prize(s), but the consolation prize was a fog lamp…
…specifically, the Cibié 45 fog lamp which came in this box:
Hummmmmm. I’m assuming that’s the whole lamp and not just the bulb. Gotta figure that most folks would have no idea how to install that. Bummer.
I’d hope that the main prize might be something like this gigantic fiberglass Esso tiger sculpture. There’s a guy a few towns over from me who has his property filled with old gas station stuff, and 2 of these things on his roof!
KITTY!!!
(Yes, it was an entire fog lamp. 18 cm diameter by just a few cm deep.)
…and two of these things on his roof!
Guys who don’t have wives get to do things like that.
Great piece to repeat, and the responses are fun too. The one time I remember entering a contest to win a car was around age 10. The old television show “Masquerade Party” used to have a special contest for the audience in which they would show, at the end of the episode, a masked celebrity in some scene related to their work and you would send in your guess. I remember my entry was related to identifying Art Carney in his role as Ed Norton rising from the sewer in The Honeymooners. And the prize was a little convertible, I’m almost certain a Datsun Fairlady (this was around 1960 or so – I see the US version was called Datsun Sports 1200) – odd choice, I know, but this is my memory. I was sure to win. But of course 1000s of correct entries came in. Don’t remember how they determined the winner – probably drew a card from the correct entry bin – but it wasn’t me. At least I had a few weeks of dreaming about winning that cool car. Fun to remember when most folks saw cars as dreams come true rather than as appliances.
I was the runner-up in one of these competitions in Belfast. The prize was a 1303 Beetle or second prize tickets to a local car show. Maybe it was just as well. In was 12.