In the early 1970s, Valenti worked as an Advertising Executive at an
NBC TV Affiliate, using clever "first time" marketing techniques such as
toll free numbers, credit card payment options, with unique slogans & phrases on the TV ads. He and his friend Barry Becher, bought an unusual painting pad gadget for their first product. The commercial featured a man in a tuxedo painting to demonstrate "no drip". The unique commercial was so successful using clever marketing techniques, toll free numbers and catchy slogans and phrases, that the product grossed $10 million is sales. In the late-1970s, Valenti developed more
DR campaigns, namely for a new knife from Douglas Quikut. Despite the extraordinary sharpness of the knife, sales languished in supermarket end cap displays. Despite the quality of the product, Valenti believed the Douglas Quikut name wasn't strong enough or unique enough and suggested a rebrand. Along with his co-founder of Dial Media, they came up with the brand name Ginsu and the life of a revolutionary kitchen item was born. The first ad for the
ginsu aired in 1978 instantly becoming an iconic
pop culture in US television history. The ads started with Ed
karate chopping a board with the announcer saying, "In Japan, the hand can be used like a knife". Then Ed went on to karate chop a tomato with the announcer continuing, "but that method doesn't wrork on a tomato. That's why you need the Ginsu".The ad continues with Ed cutting
tin cans, nails and hoses, then on to cutting bread, ham, meat and vegetables demonstrating that the knife never dulled. This form of comparison demonstrated MIarketing took America by storm and laid the foundations for the knife to become one of the best selling household products of the 1970s/80s. The revenue also meant that the annual ad spend could be really aggressive. At one point in the late 1970s, Valenti's Dial Media was spending $20 million on
infomercials annually, which according to the
Washington Post was more than
The Coca-Cola Company were spending on television advertising at the time. The knife, the adverts and the buying format started all sorts of new markets. It could be argued shopping channels like
QVC borrowed heavily the techniques created by Valenti and his business partner. One of these was the way infomercials for Ginsu were shot, often using phrases like "but wait, there's more!" to keep the viewer guessing what the knife would be used for next and how many more knives were in the offer. QVC then adopted similar product display presentations in the 1980s onwards to sell huge numbers of products around the clock. The techniques all came from Valenti's Ginsu advertisements, where the ads would show the knife cutting through something as simple as a tomato to tin cans. The Ginsu became a household name by the late 1970s, and was eventually acquired by
Berkshire Hathaway for an undisclosed sum. Ginsu around this time was a huge
pop culture brand, Jerry Seinfeld,
Johnny Carson,
Saturday Night Live,
Jay Leno and numerous movies, and TV shows used Ginsu in their routines and scripts. The Ginsu became so popular a
prehistoric shark, Cretoxyrhina Mantelli, was nicknamed "the ginsu shark" due to the sharpness of its teeth. Valenti continued to use the techniques he developed into the late 1980s and beyond, selling products such as Armourcote Cookware, Miracle Painter, Miracle slicer and numerous other all using the same marketing techniques. Decades later
Ginsu appeared in several documentaries and was included in The World's Greatest Inventions by
The History Channel. He also appeared on a
CNBC Originals documentary in 2009 about his work in the field of
infomercials. Over the period of a number of decades, Valenti and his co-founder Barry Becher sold over $500 million in products, with a large portion of those sales coming from the Ginsu. ==Recognition==