O/T A Bit of Irony in Advertising....1957 Baseball Postcard

[whitehse]

From Wikipedia....Not the most reliable source but I think in this case its one of the best

Home Viewer Showcases
The Price Is Right frequently featured a home viewer "Showcase", a multi-prize package for which home viewers were invited to submit their bids via postcard. The viewer who was closest to the actual retail price without going over won everything in the Showcase, but one item was sometimes handmade so the viewer could not check the price of all the items. The term "showcase" was later replaced by "sweepstakes".

Very often, home viewers were stunningly accurate with their bids, including several viewers who guessed the price correct down to the penny. In such a case, the tied contestants were informed and asked to give the price of a specific item; this continued until one of the contestants broke the tie (re-ties and all-overbids were thrown out.)

The Home Viewer Showcase was reformatted as the final round of the current CBS version. The two Showcase Showdown (since 1975; before then, and on the 1970s and 1980s syndicated shows, the top two overall winners automatically advanced to the Showcase round) winners on the current version's show compete to bid on separate showcases of prizes, with the contestant who bids closer (without going over) to the actual retail price of his/her own showcase winning the prizes contained within.

Home Viewer Showcases have also been featured on the CBS version, in 1972, 1978, annually from 1980–1987, 1990, and in 2011. Its format was unchanged through 1990, but the 2011 version, because of the advance in technology, changed to a ten-prizes-in-a-week format, with two prizes appearing per episode during the week. Each day the price of one of the prizes was revealed to the home audience, and the price of the second prize (which was in either of the two Showcases) was not provided. Instead of postcards, the bids had to be submitted through the show's website.[1]