Growing up in the Chicago area during the ’70′s and ’80′s, there was no shortage of local characters whose businesses became household names due to their iconic television ads.
In my world, there was Celozzi and Ettleson, who always promised with fistfuls of cash that at their Chevy dealership, you “always saved more money.” Or maybe it was Harlem Furniture where we were told we’d “like our style.” Or how the Lincoln Carpet Company (NA2-900 “National 2-9000″) or Empire Carpeting (588-2300 “Empire”) provided schoolkids with catchy phone numbers easier to remember than their own home number.
Here in Madison, it was TV Lenny from American Furniture. See an example below although I’m told it’s not the best one which was him pretending to water ski on a sofa. Can’t find that one on YouTube sadly.
The reason I bring all this up is because NBC News reported this morning there are more presidential race advertising points bought for political commercials this week in the
Yogi Berra
Madison television market than in any other city in the country. What that means is that you’re not imagining things in Dane County when you turn on the tv and see, as baseball great Yogi Berra would call it, “deja vu all over again” in regard to the race for president here in Wisconsin.
The figures show former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign and two outside organizations (Restore Our Future and Priorities USA) supporting it have bought twice as many points as President Obama’s campaign.
This statistic does not even measure the number of ads being run in Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race between former Gov. Tommy Thompson (R-Elroy) and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Madison).
All in all, it leads to a longing for TV Lenny commercials and those, sadly, long-ago great prices on the technology of yesterday. Here’s a link to other great local business commercials from the last few decades and in a month or so, take heart… they’ll be coming back.
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