Legendary pitchman Ron Popeil—the man behind Ronco, the Veg-O-Matic, the Bedazzler and much more—dies at 86

Ron Popeil, the legendary ad man behind such direct-response TV staples as the Veg-O-Matic, Ron Popeil’s Pocket Fisherman, the Inside-the-Egg Scrambler, the Bedazzler and the Cap Snaffler, has died at age 86. Popeil, an inventor and son of an inventor, practically wrote the lexicon of late-night TV commercials, including such famous selling lines as “Set it and forget it,” “Now how much would you pay?” and “But wait. There’s more!” Subscribe to Ad Age now for the latest industry news and analysis. According to Popeil’s website, his products have accumulated billions of dollars of sales since the 1950s. A representative for Popeil confirmed his death to the Associated Press, saying that he’d died “suddenly and peacefully” Wednesday at Los Angeles’ Cedars Sinai Medical Center. No cause of death was disclosed. Born in New York City in 1935, Popeil was the son of kitchen gadget inventor Samuel J. Popeil, who invented, among other things the Veg-O-Matic, also marketed as the Chop-O-Matic. After his parents’ divorce, Popeil was sent to a boarding school with his brother from age 3 to 8, which he described on his website as a “virtual orphanage,” until he went to live with his grandparents in Miami. At 13, Popeil went to work in a Chicago factory managed by his father. By 16, he began selling goods made at the factory in flea markets on Maxwell Street in Chicago, grossing as much as $500 per day. It was a great DRTV training ground, akin to the next-generation training of the late Oxi Clean pitchman Billy Mays selling products along the Atlantic City Boardwalk. By 17, Popeil was selling products from a stand at the flagship Woolworth store in Chicago, then took his show on the road to state fairs nationwide. Not long afterward, Popeil joined partner Mel Korey to produce his first minute-long black-and-white TV infomercial. Popeil was a veritable business-model machine, also creating Ronco Records, one of the first in the recording industry to make compilations of musicians works and sell them direct to consumers on TV, a tack later embraced by Time Life. He was soon generating millions of dollars in revenue from DRTV and making the transition from gadget pitchman to pop-culture icon, spawning parodies everywhere from “I Love Lucy” to “Saturday Night Live.” Popeil, indeed, inspired two SNL parodies – Dan Aykroyd’s “Bass-O-Matic” and Eddie Murphy’s “Popeil Galactic Prophylactic.” But he also appeared in several live-action and animated TV shows as himself, including “The X-Files,” “Sneakers,” “King of the Hill,” “The Simpsons,” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." High-quality journalism isn't always free. Subscribe to Ad Age now for award-winning news and insight.

Legendary pitchman Ron Popeil—the man behind Ronco, the Veg-O-Matic, the Bedazzler and much more—dies at 86

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