The Advertising Handbook: A Reference Work Covering the Principles and Practice of Advertising
A desk reference of about 740 pages published by McGraw-Hill in 1921, by S. Roland Hall, former advertising manager for Alpha Portland Cement and the Victor Talking Machine Company.
What it is
A desk reference of about 740 pages published by McGraw-Hill in 1921, by S. Roland Hall, former advertising manager for Alpha Portland Cement and the Victor Talking Machine Company. Written for business men of small or moderate experience, it sets out accepted practice in 36 sections: campaigns, agencies, psychology, slogans and trade-marks, packages, dealer aids, copy, layout, type, display, illustration, plates and papers, catalogs, every class of medium from magazines to street cars and theatre curtains, the large retail store, letters and follow-up, foreign-language advertising, laws and office forms. It teaches through hundreds of reproduced real ads, each captioned with one lesson, and through numbers: a test on one New York newspaper found the upper half of a page drew about 25 percent more attention than the lower half. The copy section opens with 14 questions to answer before writing, including how to key and test the ad.
Why read it now
This is a reference of its period, not an argument, so open it at the section you need. The 14 questions that open the copy section still work as a creative brief: what am I selling, to whom, what goes in the headline, what action do I want, how do I make it easy, how will I key and test it. His point in the foreword, that a successful ad with a flaw might do twice as well with the flaw removed, is the logic of modern iterative testing. The attention tests are weak evidence, and he says so: small groups of business-minded readers questioned outside normal reading conditions. Much has dated: engraving costs, 1-cent postage, type sizes for street-car cards. The laws section is still useful. It prints the Printers' Ink model statute against untrue or misleading ads, adopted by 22 states, which set the idea that an ad claim is a legal promise; Gulf consumer-protection rules also ban misleading claims. Use: turn his 14 questions into your team's standard brief form.
Passages worth keeping
An advertisement is not always wholly bad, and rarely is one wholly good. Copy may be fine and display mediocre.
نادرًا ما يكون الإعلان جيدًا كله أو سيئًا كله، فقد يكون النص قويًا والإخراج ضعيفًا، ولذلك يُقرأ كل مثال لدرس واحد.
It is easy to fill costly advertising space with smooth-sounding words and nicely balanced sentences.
ملء المساحة الإعلانية الغالية بكلام سلس وجمل متوازنة أمر سهل، والصعب أن يحمل الكلام رسالة تبيع.
Is there any way by which I can key or check the effects of this advertising?
من الأسئلة التي يطرحها الكاتب على نفسه قبل الكتابة: هل توجد طريقة لترميز هذا الإعلان وقياس أثره؟
That the upper half of a newspaper page has an attention-value approximately 25 per cent. greater than the lower half.
من نتائج اختبار على صحيفة أن النصف الأعلى من الصفحة يلفت الانتباه أكثر من النصف الأسفل بنحو الربع.
It is easy to see that the object of the legislators was to prevent an innocent violator of the law from being punished, but the unfortunate side is that this always gives the slick violator an opportunity to plead that he violated innocently.
إضافة كلمة «عن علم» إلى قانون الإعلان المضلل تحمي المخالف البريء، لكنها تعطي المخالف المحتال حجة يدّعي بها أنه لم يقصد.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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