Some products, such as snack and dessert items, lend themselves especially well to advertising campaigns because of the near-universal inherent desirability of the products - after all, who doesn't like ice cream or potato chips? With a more utilitarian product such as paper towels, however, it is a bit more of a challenge for advertisers to find a way appeal to the public and create advertising that distinguishes their brand from others. Procter & Gamble succeeded quite well on both counts with its print and TV ads for Bounty paper towels.
Since its introduction in 1965, one of the strengths of the Bounty brand had always been its ability to absorb relatively large amounts of liquid compared to the size of the paper towel. In order to demonstrate this quality, a series of ads were created featuring actress Nancy Walker as Rosie, the owner/server of a diner (the diner used for as the setting for the ads was an actual establishment, Rosie's Farmland Diner, in Little Ferry, New Jersey). In these ads, while interacting with Rosie a patron would inevitably topple over a drinking vessel on the counter, usually a coffee cup, and gasp as the liquid puddled. Rosie would calmly take charge, pulling out a roll of Bounty paper towels and praising their ability to clean up the spill in no time flat. She would even give the clumsy patron a demonstration on Bounty's speed of absorbing spills as compared to a competing brand. In these ads, Rosie initially touted Bounty with the catchphrase of "the quick picker upper," but which had become "the quicker picker upper" by the time of this ad in 1979.
Nancy Walker continued to appear as Rosie in Bounty ads until just shortly before her passing in 1992. To this day, Procter & Gamble still promotes the degree and speed of absorption of its paper towels in its print and TV advertisements. For those of us who lived through the '70s and '80s, however, the mention of Bounty paper towels will often bring Rosie and her diner to mind.
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