The Business of Advertising
Calkins, co-founder of the New York agency Calkins & Holden, rewrote his 1905 Modern Advertising into this textbook for young men entering the trade and for manufacturers deciding whether to advertise.
What it is
Calkins, co-founder of the New York agency Calkins & Holden, rewrote his 1905 Modern Advertising into this textbook for young men entering the trade and for manufacturers deciding whether to advertise. It maps the business in three parts: sellers of space (newspapers, magazines, street-car cards, billboards), sellers of advertising (the agency and its departments) and buyers of advertising (the manufacturer and his advertising manager). A chapter on launching a product covers markets, dealer prejudice, naming, packaging and trade-marks. The Advertising Renaissance argues that investigation now comes before copy, gives an 11-step outline, and cites a self-raising flour that lost $350,000 because the leaven sank to the bottom of the pack. The creative chapter splits the work into plan and copy and shows Pierce-Arrow selling class atmosphere through illustration. Later chapters cover retail advertising at Wanamaker and Altman and advertising as a profession. Plates reproduce real ads and trade-marks.
Why read it now
The core idea holds: the plan comes before the copy, and the plan comes from investigating the market, the trade and the buyer. Agencies and in-house teams still sell this sequence as research, strategy and brief. His "fictitious advantage", a public preference larger than the real product difference, as with Tiffany's name on a box or Pierce-Arrow's illustrated series, anticipates later work on brand salience; Ehrenberg-Bass research also finds that familiarity drives choice more than argued differences. The collar case, where the agency dropped a long list of talking points to answer the buyer's one question, "Is it correct?", is still a sound rule for writing a brief. What has dated: the media categories and rates, the view of shoppers as mostly women, and the claim that the plan rests on intuition no study can supply. His rule that advertising must be sincere reads as ethics, but he grounds it in repeat purchase: a business that sells once to each person is, in his words, a confidence game. Use: run his 11-step outline as a checklist and write no copy until the first three steps have answers.
Passages worth keeping
To-day many shrewd manufacturers keep advertising men at work two years before a single line of publicity is sent out.
المصنّع الحذر يترك فريق الإعلان يدرس السوق سنتين قبل نشر أي إعلان، لأن الحملة التي تُطلق قبل فهم الظروف قد تخسر كل ميزانيتها.
a fictitious advantage may be created which, cleverly presented by picture and text, will in time become a real one.
تفضيل الجمهور لعلامة ما يمكن أن يُبنى بالصورة والنص، ومع الوقت يصبح هذا التفضيل ميزة حقيقية في السوق.
The difference between an advertisement written to sell goods and an advertisement written to convey interesting information in an interesting way is the difference between a rug displayed in a museum for admiration and a rug displayed in the marketplace for sale.
الإعلان الممتع وحده لا يكفي، فالمطلوب إعلان يبيع، كما يختلف سجاد يُعرض في متحف ليُعجب به الناس عن سجاد يُعرض في السوق ليُشترى.
Advertising to be successful must be sincere and truthful. There are no exceptions to this rule.
الصدق شرط لنجاح الإعلان وليس خيارًا، وما يبدو استثناءً من ذلك لا يدوم.
Businesses which make only one sale to a single person can go on as long as the population holds out. But that is not business; it is a confidence game.
العمل الذي لا يعود إليه أي عميل يعيش فقط ما دام هناك أناس جدد يخدعهم، وهذا ليس تجارة بل نصب.
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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