When I was a kid in Houston, Texas, the undisputed king of furniture and mattress commercials was Mattress Mack (real name Jim McIngvale). His TV commercials were short in order to maintain a low budget, so to invest wisely in every precious second of TV time, he screamed everything really fast and waved money around, ending each spot with his phrase “GALLERY FURNITURE SAVES YOU MONEY!” He worked his way up to multi-millionaire status and used his money on things like paying for medical bills for a girl who was mauled by a lion on his property, 6-figure sports bets, award-winning thoroughbred horses, and executive-produced the movie Sidekicks with his friend Chuck Norris.
Living in Mattress Mack’s shadow was another guy: Hilton Koch.
Hilton Koch founded Hilton Furniture and Mattress in 1995. The first building he used for his furniture business had a huge sign on top of it that simply read “FACT.” Instead of spending money removing the sign, he simply left it up there and came up with the slogan “...and that’s a FACT, JACK!” that he used to sign off on his commercials, similar to Mattress Mack’s technique. Hilton also waived a chainsaw around and humped the air to grab people’s attentions and help them remember who he was. It worked because if you go to Houston and ask a local, “What’s the chainsaw guy’s slogan?” they will tell you, “...and that’s a FACT, JACK!” Anyway, the whole point of this story is that the chainsaw guy sort of introduced Conan O’Brien to the woman he would marry: Liza Powel.
In the 90s, Late Night with Conan O’Brien aired directly after the Tonight Show with Jay Leno everywhere in the USA except in Houston, Texas. Houston’s NBC affiliate station, for some reason, would play a rerun of the local nightly news plus an episode of a tabloid TV show like Extra or Inside Edition, and then an episode of a daytime talk show like Ricki Lake, Montel Williams, or Jerry Springer directly after the Tonight Show. Conan’s show didn’t air until around 2:30 AM. Because he had such a terrible timeslot in Houston, the commercial breaks during his show were for things like Chia Pets, the legendary Thunderbolt Transmission commercial, Mattress Mack’s Gallery Furniture, and the Hilton Furniture chainsaw guy. As a bit, Conan’s team had a contest for viewers to vote on who should go on his show: Mattress Mack or the Hilton Furniture chainsaw guy.
Hilton Furniture won. In addition to flying owner Hilton Koch to NYC and inviting him to be a panel guest, Conan’s team went with him to the New York office of FCB, the legendary Chicago ad agency responsible for the Gatorade commercial of people sweating different-colored Gatorade, Smokey the Bear’s “Only YOU can prevent forest fires” campaign, and the cartoon roaches yelling “RAID!” right before they die of bug spray. The plan was to have FCB take Hilton Furniture’s campaign and make a higher-quality ad with a high budget and professional production team.
Hilton isn’t a putz and he knows exactly how his low-budget commercials look, so while at the agency, he suggested, “We don’t have to have the chainsaw.” Conan absolutely rejected the suggestion and said, “You don’t take away Superman’s cape.” In my opinion, the so-called “improved” commercial they made was way worse than the local Hilton Furniture ones, but what’s important is that during the meeting with the advertising team, Conan was introduced to the creative director, artist, copywriter, etc. The copywriter at the company was Liza Powel and you can see her sitting next to Hilton Koch here:
Conan was apparently smitten with Liza during the taping and they started dating after finishing the segment. A year and a half later, they got married. They have been married for almost 25 years now and have 2 kids.
Sometimes I'll randomly think about how Conan O’Brien met Liza Powel while taping a segment of his show in which they revamped a commercial campaign for a chainsaw-wielding Houston-area discount furniture salesman, and then they got married and had kids. Conan apparently never watched the segment because he wants to preserve the memory of meeting Liza as how he remembered it and not how it was portrayed for the TV show.
When Conan and Liza got married, they invited Hilton Koch to their wedding. He accepted the invitation and attended with his wife and 2-year-old daughter.
Leave a comment