A Look Back at the Black Friday Push

How View-Master was marketed to the masses in the 1950s.

Modern shoppers have lived through many years of Black Friday sales. The term dates to the 1950s wasn’t widely used until decades later.

However, View-Master was known as a company with a strong marketing division many years before Black Friday became common parlance.

This View-Master commercial starring Henry Fonda and a very early appearance by Jodie Foster (just nine years old at the time) originally aired in 1971.

TV ads were a regular part of View-Master promotions from the earliest days of TV, but print was also a huge part of their marketing campaigns, especially in the 1950s. As we head into Black Friday and the holiday shopping season, I thought it might be fun to reprint this article from the November 1951 Dealerscope newsletter — a sales publication created exclusively for View-Master dealers.

View-Master Ads Blanket Nation in Big Sales Campaign

Over 40 Million Stereo-Story Sales Messages Slated

View-Master 2-column ads scheduled to appear in Parade and This Week and in other Sunday newspapers supplements immediately following Thanksgiving (Sunday, Nov. 25) will reach over 17 million readers in 62 of America’s largest trading areas.

This broad mass coverage is supplemental to regular View-Master advertising in the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Colliers, Coronet, Holiday, Look, Parents’, and Fawcett Comics. Sparking an over-all promotional campaign, it will boost the number of sales messages delivered during November to 21.5 million and will help tally a total coverage for the entire Stereo-Story season of more than 40 million.

This heavy advertising campaign, build around the holiday gift theme, is designed to focus emphasis on Stereo-Stories, create a greater “all-family” interest in View-Master and help accelerate the turn-over of View-Master merchandise in dealers’ stores all over the country.

Dealer Helps Available

As in Stereo-Story promotional campaigns of previous years, a wide selection of posters, banners, showcards, statement stuffers, and other dealer helps are being made available to help build View-Master traffic, volume and sales. Dealers are urged to check through their 1951 Stereo-Story Brochure for any store promotional materials they may need for Christmas advertising.

Dealers planning to make local store promotional tie-ins with the national campaign are urged to watch the dates of the scheduled national ads as a timing guide for effective results. The full-page Fawcett Comics ad appeared on newsstands Nov. 1. The big Sunday Supplement advertising will break on Nov. 25. Both of these dates provide ideal opportunities for hard-hitting window displays, local View-Master ads, radio spots and store promotions.

Imaging hearing a View-Master ad on the radio? Ha! Two things that were culturally dominant less than 100 years ago that are now basically irrelevant.

Reading this article inspired me to go to eBay and see if I could find any View-Master print ads from 1951. Below is a sampling of the kinds of print ads View-Master ran in 1951.

You can bid/buy here.

You can bid/buy that here.

You can bid/buy this one here.

Hope your holiday season is off to a fun start! Thanks for reading, as always!

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