That looks like fun

Wham-O's Richard Knerr brought America the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, the Superball - and viral marketing

(Bill Bridges/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

IT'S TIME TO wrap a small black band around your Superball. Richard Knerr, cofounder of the toy company Wham-O, died this month at 82, after suffering a stroke. Toy lovers of the world have rightfully taken notice. Together with his childhood friend and business partner Arthur "Spud" Melin, Knerr was responsible for some of the 20th century's most memorable toys: not just the Superball, but the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, the Slip-n-Slide.

Wham-O's classic toys had an appealing common theme: "Simple things are always better," Knerr told me two years ago, when I interviewed him for an Ideas story about how his toys compared with today's top-selling educational playthings. (Knerr was nearly 80 at the time, but told me, "mentally, I'm still about 15.")

But while much has been said about the elegance of Wham-O's iconic product line, Knerr was more modest about his company's other great innovation. Long before the term "viral marketing" came to be, decades before anyone thought of hanging lights on bridges to promote a cartoon to hipsters, Knerr and Melin understood the power of word of mouth. The joys of a Wham-O product, after all, weren't always easy to describe. But kids quickly latched onto a concrete demonstration. When it came to the Superball, "all you had to do was bounce one," Knerr recalled, "and every kid that could see it wanted one."

Knerr and Melin worked hard to find that sort of product, and they took ideas from everywhere. The inventor of the Frisbee - then called the Pluto Platter - had been doing demonstrations at county fairs before Wham-O bought the rights in the late 1950s. The Superball came from a chemical engineer who had been experimenting with rubber to build an industrial valve. The Hula Hoop had its origins in a rattan hoop that a friend of Knerr and Melin's brought back from a trip to Australia. Wham-O executives didn't know what to do with it until they finally asked an Australian who was visiting the plant. He blushingly demonstrated the proper motion in the back of a warehouse, and Knerr and Melin knew they were onto something.

Still, they had to spread the word, a process Wham-O executives referred to as "seeding the market." Those days, Wham-O didn't have an ad agency. The company produced commercials and artwork in-house, often on a shoestring - early product packaging featured pictures of the founders' families. But Wham-O knew how to get its toys in front of the right people. Melin and his wife would invite themselves onto local television stations to Hula Hoop. They would call the local newspapers and announce they were having a contest. They would give out hoops to local kids, or sell them on consignment to toy shops. Knerr even set a company rule at one point: Any Wham-O executive who took a flight had to bring a Hula Hoop on board. The flight attendants, he figured, were bound to ask about it.

Today, this sort of stealth advertising - dependent on firsthand experience and extended social networks - is big business. Viral marketing is the sole focus of many ad agencies, the subject of books and studies, an increasingly common way to sell everything from movies to airline tickets. Companies will even pay regular folks, from college students to starving artists, to do what Wham-O did for itself in the 1950s: talk up products, hand out samples, and spread buzz.

Knerr and Melin weren't trying to change an industry. They just knew that "seeding the market" was as good - and inexpensive - a way as any to sell toys. And they had a way of making their products look like pure, unadulterated fun. Part of that was clearly being young at heart. Part of it was knowing what their target market liked. "We'd always try 'em out on kids," Knerr said of his toys, "because they were our boss."

Joanna Weiss writes about TV and pop culture for the Globe. She can be reached at weiss@globe.com.