House ad as portfolio

The pattern

This still is filed under House ad as portfolio.

Define

The firm advertises itself by showing the work, not by describing the work.

Mechanism

Proof by exhibit. The portfolio is the claim. Captions stay short. The pieces carry the argument.

Verdict

We sell craft and the buyer can judge from examples.

Why it works

The headline is an observed number rather than an opinion, and the number is small enough to picture - thirty-two sales, one every two minutes. From there the argument is arithmetic: the clerk's time divided by the dealer's item count leaves no room for persuasion, so push is disproved rather than disparaged. Push and pull are set as opposing forces with the counter between them, a spatial metaphor the reader can hold. The close converts the whole case into a budget reallocation question and puts the competitor in it, framing inaction as a handicap accepted voluntarily.

The big idea

A drug-store clerk makes a sale every two minutes among thousands of items, so dealer push cannot sell your product; only consumer pull built by advertising can.

The offer

J. Walter Thompson Company's service planning campaigns that create consumer "pull". The reader is asked if he is taking full advantage of the pull of 105,000,000 people. No terms stated.

The proof

Checkings at three toilet goods counters in rush hours: 32 sales per clerk per hour. Druggists stock 5,000 articles, hardware dealers 6,000 to 10,000, grocers over 1,000. Chain stores seldom stock unadvertised articles.

Lines from the ad

32 sales per clerk per hour

Less than two minutes for the drug store clerk to complete all the steps of selling each separate article!

The retailer can "push" articles profitably only when his customers are "pulling" from the other side of the counter.

Steal this when

Use this when the prospect's budget sits in a channel or sales-force tactic you want to move upstream. Find one timed or counted observation from the field that makes the current tactic arithmetically impossible, then let the reallocation argument follow.