Robert W. Smyth, 1922 - 2008

Robert W. Smyth died May 7, in Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, IL.

You don’t know who Robert Smyth was, do you? He was the man who came up with the idea for the Quaker Oats Great Klondike Big Inch Land Caper advertising campaign in 1955. From the Chicago Tribune:

Just 32 years old at the time of the Yukon campaign and only a copywriter at the firm, Mr. Smyth helped adapt the idea from an article he read in Life magazine about two men selling pieces of Texas.

So for a few weeks in 1955, each box of Puffed Wheat Cereal contained a deed to a square inch of land in the Yukon. These were the years when every kid with a television watched Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and every kid who watched wanted their own plot of land right where Sergeant Preston and his trusty dog King had their weekly adventures.

Millions of those deeds still exist. The Lands Branch in the Yukon has a file 18 inches thick containing inquiries into the status of the properties attached to these deeds.

The answer, unfortunately, is not good news. Quaker Oats never registered the deeds because it would have been much too expensive, so the pieces of paper that came in the cereal boxes were worthless right from the start. And then, in 1965, the Canadian government took back the land Quaker Oats bought for the promotion. The reason? Nonpayment of $37.20 in taxes.

But here is good news:
You can still have a worthless piece of paper like this for only $29.95!

Some of the “landowners” got just a little upset about their raw deal.  

Charles Matznick, of Detroit, wrote several letters in the mid-60s and at one point threatened legal action if he wasn’t given title to the land.

On Jan. 4, 1965 the commissioner of the Yukon and the Prime Minister of Canada received letters from Iowa resident (sic) Steven T. Spoorl and John A. Zook.

“This is to inform you that certain areas located between Dawson and Whitehorse…hereafter to be referred to as Xanadu, hereby declare themselves free and independant (sic, again) from the Yukon Territory, the Dominion of Canada and the British Commonwealth of Nations.” (Source)

It was a bit of a scam right from the start, wasn’t it? But Robert Smyth’s idea worked on one level. Twenty-one million boxes of cereal were sold in just a few weeks. It was one of the most successful sales promotions in the history of advertising in North America. And when you’re in advertising, that’s what’s most important, isn’t it?