Libby, McNeill & Libby Cooked Corned Beef trade card
The pattern
This still is filed under Keepable trade card.
Define
A small card people keep (pretty, useful, or collectible) that carries the brand after the encounter.
Mechanism
Retention object. The gift is the media. Recall is paid for by usefulness or delight, not by repetition.
Verdict
We can put a physical or digital keepable in someone's pocket and they will not throw it away.
Why it works
The card is a keepsake first and an advertisement second, which is the whole economics of the medium - it had to survive in a scrapbook, so the picture takes the full sheet and the selling is crowded into the sky. Placing the tin in the boat as one more picnic object is the actual argument: no claim is made about taste or price, the product is simply shown as something these people already have. Breaking COOKED CORNED BEEF into three tilted plaques keeps the product description legible against a busy sky and gives the eye a staircase to follow down into the image. Used by all is pure bandwagon, and in 1885 that was still enough, because the job was to make a shopper ask for a name rather than for corned beef.
Steal this when
Copy this when the product is undifferentiated and the real task is name recall - make the artefact worth keeping, then place the product inside the scene rather than arguing for it. The stepped word plaques are a useful device any time a long product descriptor must sit over a busy image.