Billy Mays: Pitch perfect

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/2009/06/29/2009-06-29_billy_took_an_old_game_to_new_heights.html

Billy Mays: Pitch perfect
Monday, June 29th 2009

Billy Mays didn't invent the art of the television huckster, but he rode it further than almost anyone who came before him.

Long before his sudden and shocking death yesterday, Mays had made himself far better known than any product he pitched.

Exactly how Mays became the dominant brand in the TV sales game is hard to explain.

He represented everything Americans say we don't like about salesmen.

At some point in most of his pitches, Mays would stop explaining why the product was good and go into hard-sell overdrive, his voice rising into a cross between a yell and a bark.

If you don't buy this, you're an idiot, he seemed to be saying.

It might not have been pleasant, but it helped sell a lot of OxiClean.

He made a smart decision, it turned out, in going the hard-sell route.

Nice guys are often considered better long-term bets in the sales game, as witnessed by the recently departed Ed McMahon, who used his comforting persona to sell insurance and mortgage products to seniors.

The "Yowza-yowza-yowza" style has been a winner, too, even before television.

Some of the great attractions in rural America a century ago were medicine shows that would roll into town, serve up some song and dance and finish with a salesman, often a bogus "doctor," pitching a quack product like Hadacol, an alleged miracle cure-all that was really just cheap booze.

Billy Mays was in some ways the television incarnation of a medicine-show quack.

He knew the product.

More important, he knew the crowd.

dhinckley@nydailynews.com