How to Advertise: A Guide to Designing, Laying Out, and Composing Advertisements
A 1917 manual by George French, published by Doubleday, Page & Company for the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, on one narrow subject: the physical advertisement and its "attention value." French sets aside campaign, product and copy and asks what makes an ad catch the eye of someone turning pages.
What it is
A 1917 manual by George French, published by Doubleday, Page & Company for the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, on one narrow subject: the physical advertisement and its "attention value." French sets aside campaign, product and copy and asks what makes an ad catch the eye of someone turning pages. He traces display from the unheaded ads in Addison's Spectator to the "typographical orgies" of his day, names seven art principles for layout (harmony, proportion, balance, symmetry, tone, perspective, color), and gives chapters on type, illustration, engraving methods, ornament, optics and the shape of the space, including the golden section. Specimen ads from Yuban, Ivory Soap, Shredded Wheat, Community Plate and others carry one-line verdicts. A worked example follows copy for an imaginary clock company from typescript through three settings to the finished ad. He ends by blaming front-office taste for much of the waste.
Why read it now
His central claim holds: an ad is looked at before it is read, and most loss happens at that first glance. Modern eye-tracking studies agree that most print and feed ads get a second or two, and that a clear hierarchy with one dominant entry point wins that time. His warning that a portrait looking away from the text pulls the eye off the argument matches later research on gaze cues. His closing point, that shock gets attention but not the kind that builds a customer, is a fair check on stunt creative. What has dated: the seven art principles and the golden section are asserted, not tested; figures such as a misplaced ornament costing 50 per cent of attention are guesses; and his case for restraint was written for crowded newspaper pages, not feeds where motion and sound compete. Use: before approving an ad, write down the order in which the eye should move from headline to logo, then ask a colleague to look for two seconds and say what they saw.
Passages worth keeping
First of all, the advertisement must be a picture. After that is provided for, if it is still possible, the picture may lead toward the selling motive of the advertisement.
الإعلان يجب أن يكون صورة جذابة للعين أولًا، ثم إن أمكن تقود هذه الصورة القارئ نحو الدافع إلى الشراء.
Harmony, the relation of the units. Proportion, the relation of the dimensions. Balance, the relation of the positions.
أول ثلاثة من مبادئه الفنية: الانسجام هو علاقة الأجزاء ببعضها، والتناسب علاقة الأبعاد، والتوازن علاقة المواضع.
It is essential that they form an optical sequence, leading from the catch line to the signature; and they ought to tell much of the story of the advertisement.
أسطر العرض البارزة يجب أن تقود العين في تسلسل واحد من العنوان إلى اسم المعلن، وأن تحكي وحدها معظم قصة الإعلان.
The eye is a shirk. It will not willingly attend to that which makes it work.
العين كسولة بطبعها، ولا تنتبه طوعًا إلى ما يرهقها، فعلى الإعلان أن يريحها لا أن يجهدها.
Attention may be had by hitting a man with a club, but not the kind of attention that is likely to lead to future profitable relations between the man hit and the hitter.
الإعلان الصادم يحصل على الانتباه كما تحصل عليه ضربة عصا، لكنه انتباه لا يبني علاقة مربحة مع العميل.
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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