Nuggety Goodness

After the recent, somewhat choppy look at the various Venezuelan Topps tattoo issues here of late, I've stockpiled some interesting scans that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  So today I'm just going to wing it with some interesting Nuggets O'Topps related stuff.

You may recall the early card dealer Sam Rosen and the matchbooks he had designed every year for the annual Rathkamp Matchcover Society conventions starting in 1948. Well 1956's effort has now revealed itself, along with a very slight address change just down the street from a prior location, from where he was also selling aftermarket baseball and other trading cards :

Convention Committee Chair?  Sam seems like he was the kind of guy that would relish the role and was an eminently logical choice as the show was held in his hometown and he liked to have a good time with the boys.  I love stern visage and, even moreso,  the chair made out of a matchcover but watch that cigar ash Sam!  Some of his past made the reverse:

I'm hoping the 1957 and 1958 versions will eventually pop up as I suspect he would have had some made up for each do; he would pass at the end of 1958 so that year would be the absolute possible end of these.

At the end of a matchcover convention, I'd imaging you would want something to freshen your breath after all the cigars and cigarettes that had been smoked.  What better way then with some Scents gum, as seen here in a scan provided by Friend o'the Archive Jason Rhodes:

Scents looks very much like a reboot of the original Topps product, a one cent gum tab aimed at adults, then reformulated to mimic C. Howard's Violet Gum. Take a look at the box and gum it copied:

(Courtesy C. Howard)

Topps was adept at ripping off candy-coated gum, that's for sure.

And how about those Niners?  No, not the football team, the actual '49ers where the 100th anniversary of the California Gold Rush informed a 1948-49 sales promotion we've seen bits of previously:

Sales promotions would rapidly pivot to Bazooka after this as the ubiquitous one cent tab had been introduced before 1949 was shown the door. 

See ya next time!

Foreversharp

BFF o'the Archive Jeff Sherman sent some old Topps promotional material across my transom the other month and it's high time I unveil things here.

Regular readers of this blog know that Topps unofficially dubbed their pre-Bazooka penny gum tab the Changemaker. I have no idea who came up with this slogan but it was genius.  Now Bazooka eventually led to the demise of their first and quite traditional gum line but in 1947, as the postwar boom was taking off, things were going full tilt at Topps. Until the point of discontinuance was reached in the early 50's they had deployed a multi-layered advertising and promotional campaign that was a thing of beauty.

In a continuation of their waritme use of comic illustration humorous ads aimed at consumers were deployed in various magazines, on subway cars and buses around the country and pretty much anywhere they could fit one in.  Here's a prime example:

The best way to push their ubiquitous penny tab to consumers was to get the jobbers and their customers in line. Jobbers (wholesalers) got to participate in the Topps Jamboree, which gave away such prizes as new cars and exotic vacations to the top selling individual performers.  This blurb from a 1949 trade journal shows just how well their PR machine was oiled:

You can see an old American Leaf Tobacco Company connection in the winner of that 4th place prize. Retailers didn't get left out but the prizes became commensurately skimpier the further down the food chain they went. This promotional pamphlet from 1947 (about a year earlier than the cartoon ad above) laid it all out:

Those premium certificates have been covered here in depth and were key to the Topps sales and marketing strategies. For this iteration of the Changemaker promotional cycle, things were decidedly Eversharp:

As to what was so Eversharp, I have to say it was quite disappointing, although not having been around at the time maybe I'm overthinking things...

...or maybe I'm not-mechanical pencils were probably just as boring a prize back then as they would be today!

Juicy Jamboree

Extra! Extra!  Gee, I've always wanted to say that....and now thanks to a recent arrival here at the main Topps Archives Research Complex I can.

Using my immense powers of deduction, it would appear Topps commenced a monthly newspaper for their jobbers in January of 1948.  Jamboree was the name and increasing sales was the game. The lone issue I have is a four pager printed in 11" x 17" tabloid size on very high quality paper.As you can see, Topps treated their top wholesalers very well.  Here is more to that story (I can't fit the entire thing on my scanner, sorry):

I gather Jamboree was also the name of their sales competition.

While there is not a lot of meat as concerns Topps production, this thing is a veritable cornucopia of marketing information. Topps was really slingin' that PR hash, yessir Mr. Walter Winchell even got into the act:

We also get some primordial Bazooka advertising, along with some typical content:

And since it was a man's world back then, what publication was complete without some cheesecake:

Topps sales manager Hugh Spencer got into the act in a big way:

I think this comic strip is my favorite part of the entire issue; it ties in the contest winner from the front cover quite nicely:

Meanwhile, the back cover has a massive list of jobber's salesmen who won Jamboree prizes in March:

This is a neat little cartoon as well:

The whole issue was folded three times and a few copies were likely thrown in with each jobbers orders.  I find the whole Topps sales incentive program fascinating and illustrative of how hard they pushed their reps and customers to move product..

I am pretty sure Topps also had an internal house organ for their employees but I have not yet seen a copy.