Billy Mays... Great marketing or just plain outright annoying?

When you think of the name Billy Mays, the first three things that come to your mind are OxiClean, Orange Glow and the question "where is the aspirin?"

The history of Billy Mays is a rather interesting one – starting his career as a salesperson on the Atlantic City Boardwalk all the way down to overseeing an empire of infomercial goodness. While his trademark pitch is generally excepted as unconventional, a lot of people I have talked to recently agree that Billy Mays is just plain annoying.

Nevertheless, the statistics on the sales benefits of the OxiClean and Orange Glow brand with Billy Mays as the ‘pitchman’ are hard to ignore, as Church and Dwight (the makers of Arm and Hammer) acquired Orange Glo International (the makers of OxiClean and Orange Glow) for $325.4 million dollars in 2006 (source: 2007 Church and Dwight annual report.)

About a year later, the annual report states:

“Net sales were $2,220.9 million, a 14% increase over the previous year. Contributing to this increase was a full year of sales on the Orange Glo International (OGI) household products business, which we acquired in August 2006.”

While there are obviously other underlying factors associated with this acquisition, on the surface, it would seem that the ‘power of’ Billy Mays compelled Church and Dwight to acquire the organization.

Sales and Marketing victory? Or did they truly buy the company for it's product line?

I know one thing for sure. It would be great to have Billy Mays do a sales pitch for this blog. You know how many visitors I would get?