Did Burma-Shave Offer to Send a Contest Winner to Mars?

[NomoneyNohoney]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-read-planet/

A long read, but very interesting...

[bungeejumper]

Can't equal that one right now, although I'm going to keep on racking my brains for a while longer. ISTR that some of the 19th century hucksters (PT Barnum etc) were quite adept at this sort of thing.

Adolf Hitler deserves some kind of a runner-up prize for persuading his people to save up for a new car by buying enough government stamps to fill a savings book. Scam scam scammity scam - although actually they had other worries by the time the vouchers fell due for presentation , and nobody ever got the car. He'd spent it all on the Russian front.

And who can forget the Hoover free flights offer in the 1990s? Two free return tickets to America if you spent £100 on a new vacuum cleaner? (The market value of the flights at the time was around £600.) "Two free flights! Unbelievable!", as the ad campaign went. And surprise, surprise, it was. Hoover got 300,000 applications for the tickets, and it would have broken the company if it hadn't reneged on the offer.

Might as well have been Uranus, which in a manner of speaking it was.

BJ