What Advertisers Can Learn From Billy Mays

The outpouring of memorials and remembrances following the death of TV pitchman Billy Mays was a testament to the career he had built, while also speaking to the true reach of direct-response TV. News of Mays’ untimely death hit in the middle of a string of celebrity deaths, with Mays’ obituary sharing space with the King of Pop (Michael Jackson), one of the world’s most famous pin-up girls (Farrah Fawcett), an iconic TV personality (Ed McMahon) and a rumor mill that had even more famous people dying. Despite the competition, the death of TV’s biggest reigning pitchman was national news.

Mays had achieved a kind of cult status that made him interesting to almost everyone, and contradicted the common misconception that only a select demographic watches DRTV. Google "Billy Mays" and you will find more than 3.5 million entries that transcend demographic boundaries. My 10-year-old-nephew was a big fan. My erudite lawyer called to ask about Mays. The week after his death, I was at a dinner with senior-level marketing executives from two Fortune 500 companies, and most of the dinner conversation surrounded Billy.

Mays’ broad appeal was not a surprise to me. Several years ago my agency was hired by OxiClean, the brand that put him on the map, to deal with its "Billy Mays" issue. The company had rapidly grown from a "pitchman" and "home shopping" product into a large national retail brand, to a great extent based on the power of Billy’s pitch. Big-money competitors were nipping at its heels with versions of "Oxi" products, and OxiClean wanted to keep up the momentum. It had initially been advised that it needed to migrate from DRTV into a more sophisticated brand strategy and had hired a well-known brand agency to produce expensive, beautiful and amusing new commercials…

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