For a child of the ’50s, Saturday morning television was a rite of passage. A recitation of titles from that era is enough to give a boomer chills: The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Andy’s Gang, Howdy Doody, Sky King, The Lone Ranger, Fury and who could forget Tales of the Texas Rangers?
Just as the heroes and villains of these old shows burned memories into young minds, so too did the sponsors who brought you the shows. Yet it’s surprising how few of the brands that sponsored those shows are still big brands today. Flavor Straws are gone, Yoo-hoo is a mere shadow of itself, and what of the grand daddy of them all, Ovaltine, the drink that launched a million mail-ins?
“Who but the hearty Swiss could have created Ovaltine” ran a line in an old ’50s commercial for the brand, to which most children would have rejoined “Anyone with no sense of taste whatsoever!” The brand was created in the late 19th century in Bern by a chemist named George Wander who invented an inexpensive way of removing malt extract from barley. His dream was to add vitamins and minerals to this syrup and to market it as a cure for malnutrition.
The problem was the thick, sweet syrup tasted like, well, like malted barley. George’s son Albert realized that folks would have to be really, really malnourished to buy his dad’s concoction. Undaunted, Albert experimented with the product, adding whey, sugar and beet extract to create a brand called Ovomaltine that he marketed as an energy drink. It was an instant sensation at Swiss ski resorts, where it was served hot to turn-of-the-century sybarites.
In 1909, Ovomaltine was imported to U.K., where it was rebranded as Ovaltine. When the company came out with a cocoa version of the brand several years later, the definitive identity of the brand was locked. From a taste standpoint, Ovaltine was to chocolate milk what coffee was to tea: similar in style, but radically different in taste. What really made the brand in ther U.K. — as well as in America, where it was soon to be imported — was the marketing. Taking a cue from its founder, the company elected to target young children with the brand and to stress its health attributes. To this end, it became an early and enthusiastic sponsor of kid-targeted radio programs.
In 1935, the company created an action-adventure show in England for the brand called The League of Ovaltineys. Children became members in this “secret club” by mailing in coupons printed on each jar’s inner seal. Once in the club, they were encouraged to mail in for a seemingly never-ending series of club-themed premiums. Astonishingly, by 1939 five million British children — more than 10% of the total U.K. population — were card-carrying Ovaltineys.
The brand wasn’t idle in the U.S. during this time. Ovaltine advertised on a variety of kids’ adventure shows on radio, most notably Little Orphan Annie, which they sponsored from 1930 to 1941. In the 1930s, the company solved a frequent complaint, product solubility, by creating the wildly popular Little Orphan Annie Shake-up Mug as a mail-in premium pitched directly to kids during commercial broadcasts. The success of this early premium seemed to convince the company that it could drive sales with mail-in premiums themed around its entertainment properties. (Ovaltine presaged McDonald’s wildly successful Happy Meal program with Walt Disney Co. by a good 50 years.)
After the sponsorship of Little Orphan Annie ended in 1941, Ovaltine became the sponsor of Captain Midnight, a relationship that continued when this show made the jump from radio to television. The brand stuck to what it knew, and continued to offer show-themed decoder badges and Shake-up Mugs until Captain Midnight ended in 1957.
You would think that after offering show-themed decoder badges on an almost annual basis from 1930 to 1957, Ovaltine would have pretty well saturated the market on this concept. But of course, you’d be wrong. The wonderful thing about promoting to children is that there’s a new one born every minute of every day.
In 1955, my favorite Saturday morning TV show was Tales of the Texas Rangers, (“brought to you by Ovaltine”). My brother Gregory and I used to lie on the rug in our den and watch this show with our six-guns at the ready. (In those post-World War II days, any young boy that didn’t pack some kind of toy “heat” was regarded as a “sissy.”) I remember one Saturday, in particular, when one of the rangers addressed us directly at the end of the show and offered to mail us a Texas Ranger decoder badge in exchange for Ovaltine proofs.
My brother and I were confirmed Nestlé’s Quik drinkers, vastly preferring its true “chocolatey” flavor to the somewhat-medicinal taint of Ovaltine. Oh sure, we’d do a Bosco, and here and there a Hershey’s Syrup milk in a pinch, but we were definitely non-users of the Ovaltine brand. Those rats at Ovaltine, however, knew that offering genuine Texas Ranger decoder badges was a prize that no real American boy could turn his back on.
Getting our mother to buy Ovaltine for the required number of proofs wasn’t as tough as it should have been because she was an unrepentant Shake-up Mug girl from her own childhood in the 1930s. The problem was gagging down enough of the product to get the badge. We managed, however, because I remember vividly the day our badge arrived.
Being a kindergartener, I was home when the mail came. Valuing my health and baby teeth, I wisely refrained from opening the package until my brother came home from third grade. “Our badge is here,” I joyously announced. “What do you mean our badge?” he replied, “it’s addressed to me. Besides,” he added unnecessarily, “how can you use it when you can’t even write.” Possession, to say nothing about size, being nine tenths of the law, his treachery stuck. I did get a measure of revenge, however, the very next Saturday when the host ranger gave the numbers for decoding the secret message into letters at the end of the show. “What’s the secret message?” our mother asked, passing through the den. “T-U-N-E-I-N-N-E-X-T-W-E-E-K,” her “smartest” son replied. “The great ones never change,” she laughed, leaving us to Sky King.
Rod Taylor is senior VP of promotions for CoActive Marketing in Cincinnati. E-mail him at [email protected] if you have a promotion that you’d like to see profiled here.
Kid Dreams [a sampling of Ovaltine premiums]
Decoder Badges A staple premium for Ovaltine from 1935 to 1955, each badge had a fixed outer circle surrounded by numbers, and a revolving inner circle surrounded by letters. The show host would read numbers that kids would write down. “Secret messages” could be decoded by turning the inner circle to the number, and then noting the corresponding letter. Seven different decoders were offered on the Little Orphan Annie radio show alone. Captain Midnight and Tales of the Texas Rangers also featured decoder badges. Most children didn’t think it at all strange that the secret message often was “Drink your Ovaltine.”
Shake-up Mugs If you’ve ever tried to mix Ovaltine crystals and milk, you’ll understand why these were de rigeur for young children. This premium was second only to decoder badges in frequency. It’s not hard to find Shake-up Mugs featuring Little Orphan Annie, Captain Midnight and Howdy Doody at flea markets.
Captain Midnight Rings Five different rings were offered as premiums and their names say it all: the Flight Commander Ring, the Whirlwind Whistling Ring, the Sliding Secret Compartment Ring, the Mystic Eye Detector Ring and the Mystic Sun God Ring. They don’t write copy like this anymore and we’re all the poorer for its passing.
Other popular premiums included: pins, badges, secret maps, bracelets, masks, comics, pictures of the stars, sheet music, games, puzzles, transfer pictures and membership cards. (For more information on radio and TV premiums visit www.thecrimsoncollector.com.)
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