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E. E. Calkins and the Fate of Sunny Jim
The fate of the Sunny Jim campaign was sealed even as the first
series of ads was running. Edward Ellsworth sought professional
advice from Calkins & Holden
about an advertising campaign for H-O, paying for the two principals to travel
to Buffalo. As part of their deal, Calkins offered to take over the Sunny Jim
account as well. He later confessed to a gathering of advertising men that
he “hated it,” allegedly because it used humor. Once under the
control of the New York advertising agency, the Sunny Jim campaign was stripped
of the wit and innocence that had characterized the Hanff-Ficken creations.
No longer a quirky old man, Sunny Jim became the spokesman for the product
and started preaching a doctrine of “Be Sunny”—a message
of positive thinking taken directly from the ideas of C. W. Post. The six-line
jingles were replaced with long, often preachy, prose copy. The depiction
of Sunny Jim was transformed from a simple line drawing into a three-dimensional
drawing that gave him an oddly egg-shaped head.
At about the time Calkins took over the account, a story in the
Canadian Grocer gave a good picture of the situation of Force cereal.
When the Sunny Jim campaign began, Force had been milled in one
plant in Buffalo; by early 1904, there were four Force food mills:
two in Buffalo, one in Chicago and one in Hamilton, Ontario. Together
they produced three hundred and sixty thousand packages daily.
Because the records of neither the Force Food Company nor Calkins & Holden
still exist, it is difficult to create a complete chronology of
their relationship. However, Sunny Jim ads appeared in magazines
as late as November 1904. Nor is it possible to tell who actually
ended the Sunny Jim campaign in America. Calkins may have administered
the coup de grace or it may have been left to the next advertisers
who worked for Ellsworth. Either way, Calkins retained a reserve
of resentment against this campaign that reappeared whenever he
had a chance to comment on it. A prolific self-promoter, Calkins
wrote over two dozen books on advertising, marketing, and business—some
of which went into multiple editions—as well as several versions
of his autobiography. By his death at age ninety-six in 1964, he
had succeeded in making his version of turn-of-the-century American
advertising history into the industry standard.
In his 1924 autobiography Louder Please, Calkins says that Ellsworth
dismissed Calkins & Holden as his advertising agency and left
them with a large debt for promotional watches that they had purchased.
One fact is certain: Ellsworth had overextended his reach. He expanded
his business into feed grains and flour milling, and built a mill
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to produce Pawnee cereal. After reorganizing
the various operations into the Edward Ellsworth Company, he borrowed
a large sum of money in 1907 to keep it all afloat. When he failed
to satisfy them, his creditors—mostly large banks—took
control of his commercial empire.
In the first of many corporate changes, the Ellsworth holdings
were bought by the Hecker Company and renamed. It was, briefly,
the Hecker H-O Company and then the H-O Company. From that point,
the name and control of the company changed with each new owner.
Between 1908 and 1983, this happened at least eight times, in a
bewildering series of mergers, takeovers, and spin-offs. In each
case, Force cereal became a smaller part of some ever-larger corporate
organization. The last owner, CPC International, closed its milling
operations in 1983, ending the American production of the cereals
that Edward Ellsworth created at the turn of the century.
The fate of Sunny Jim was quite a different story. After Ellsworth’s
company ceased using it, the Sunny Jim cam-paign’s bad reputation
continued to build in the American advertising community. It was
cited as a bad example, even when its critics couldn’t agree
what was bad about it. In 1908, Gaston LeRoy, advertising manager
for the Western Clock Manufacturing Company commented in a memo
to the Board of Directors:
| Personally I would not recommend
any so-called “clever” advertising or humorous
copy... for instance like the Sunny Jim campaign for the Force
Breakfast Food Co. |
In 1914, G. H. E. Hawkins used the campaign as a negative example
in his widely-used book on Newspaper Advertising:
| “ Sunny Jim-Jim Dumps” is
almost a memory. He was a national character while he existed,
but the trouble was there wasn’t enough direct connection
between “Sunny Jim” and the product. In this case,
one didn’t know whether to ask for “Sunny Jim” or
Force. |
Yet, while critics deprecated the effectiveness of the Sunny Jim
campaign, Dorothy Ficken’s artwork and Minnie Hanff’s
jingles kept reappearing in association with Force cereal. As Calkins & Holden
took over the account, a small soft-cover book of Hanff’s
Sunny Jim jingles accompanied by color versions of Ficken’s
art was offered as Force’s first premium. In 1908, the reconstituted
H-O Company offered a Sunny Jim doll (based on Dorothy Ficken’s
art and described as “The greatest hit since the Teddy Bears”)
as a premium. In 1910, an even more elaborate premium was offered:
a thirty-six page booklet, with full color pictures by W. W. Denslow,
illustrator of The Wizard of Oz. Titled Through Foreign Lands with
Sunny Jim, and following his adventures around the world, it promoted
Force cereal on every page. Both the Denslow booklet and an even
later revival of Sunny Jim in 1932 owed much to the fact that Sunny
Jim had found a new and more hospitable home in England. [more]
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