Advertising and Selling: Principles of Appeal and Response
A 1913 textbook by Harry L. Hollingworth, instructor in psychology at Columbia, built from lectures to the Advertising Men's League of New York City and published for the League by D. Appleton.
What it is
A 1913 textbook by Harry L. Hollingworth, instructor in psychology at Columbia, built from lectures to the Advertising Men's League of New York City and published for the League by D. Appleton. It argues that the pulling power of an appeal can be measured before money is spent. Chapter I ranks sets of real ads in the laboratory and compares the order with keyed returns: for five machinery ads the two orders matched exactly, and the best ad drew forty times the inquiries of the worst, which cost six times as much. The book then splits an ad's work into four tasks: catch attention, hold it, fix the impression in memory, and provoke the response, with chapters on size, contrast, isolation, colour, type, association and suggestion. The last chapters rank appeals such as healthfulness and cleanliness by persuasiveness and compare the rankings of men and women.
Why read it now
Its lasting idea is pretesting: have a small panel of target buyers rank the options before you spend, then check the ranking against real returns. Copy testing and panel pretests today follow the same logic, though later research found that some lab measures predict sales and others do not, so his three clean examples overstate the case. The four tasks map closely onto the attention, engagement, memory and action stages used now. Two findings still matter. In E. K. Strong's recall study of 77 full-page ads in Everybody's Magazine, ads built on interest (pictures, feeling, humour, relevance) were remembered far more than ads built on size and contrast alone. And when advertising men guessed which appeals would move women, their ranking corresponded with women's actual ranking at only 41 per cent, against 65 per cent for men: a warning for any team writing for buyers unlike themselves. Dated: the nerve-energy explanations, the instinct theory and the reliance on college students as subjects. Use: before a campaign, show five coded appeals to 20 people from the target segment and ask them to rank them.
Passages worth keeping
C pulled forty times as many inquiries as did D, in spite of the fact that the cost of running and preparing D was six times as great as for C.
الإعلان الذي رتّبه المختبر أولًا جلب أربعين ضعف ما جلبه الأخير، مع أن الأخير كلّف ستة أضعاف، فالتكلفة لا تصنع قوة الإعلان.
they were doubtless constructed by "inspiration," without any conscious or formulated plan in mind, and they well-nigh defy analysis, either by the advertising men or by the psychologists.
الإعلانات التي نسيها القراء كُتبت بالإلهام وحده دون خطة واضحة، حتى إن الخبراء لم يجدوا فيها أداة يمكن تحليلها.
the final value of an appeal depends entirely upon the effectiveness with which it leads to the desired specific action.
قيمة الإعلان في النهاية تقاس بقدرته على دفع القارئ إلى الفعل المطلوب، لا بلفت النظر أو البقاء في الذاكرة وحدهما.
these experts had very incorrect ideas as to the relative strength of these appeals for men and women in general
خبراء الإعلان أخطؤوا كثيرًا في تقدير ما يؤثر في عامة الرجال والنساء، وكان خطؤهم أكبر في تقدير ما يؤثر في النساء.
it is not so much the possession of psychological data which will prove of practical service in daily life, but rather the acquisition of the psychological attitude of inquiry, observation and interpretation.
الفائدة العملية ليست في حفظ نتائج التجارب، بل في اكتساب عادة السؤال والملاحظة والتفسير.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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