I was thinking back to when I went out to SoCal for the first time back in college, and was surprised to see most, if not all, of the game shows currently in production advertising on the front page of the Classified section of the Sunday L.A. Times.
For those not familiar with the ads, they were mostly 1-column-wide classified ads that looked like a larger, columnar Help Wanted ad, except they had the game show's logo instead of a company's logo either at the top or bottom of the ad.
Here are the questions I have for those who were familiar with these ads:
• Was this just an L.A. thing, or did they do this also in New York or elsewhere while game shows were in production?
(The following questions relate more to the shows that were already airing on TV, and not new shows that were in production but yet to be seen, since the newspaper was really the only way to get
potential contestants for a "newbie" show):
• About what year did game shows start advertising for contestants in the Classifieds?
• Did production companies not get enough willing applicants through the in-show contestant plugs? (I say this because I can recall seeing ads for Card Sharks, Super Password and Scrabble,
which were all familiar shows on TV at the time).
• Did production companies get better response from the paper than from their in-show plugs for contestants on TV?
• Does anyone out there have any visual examples of such ads, and/or collect examples of said ads?