The Men Who Advertise: An Account of Successful Advertisers, Together with Hints on the Method of Advertising
An 1870 volume from Geo. P. Rowell & Co., the New York advertising agency, binding three works in one cover: The Men Who Advertise, the American Newspaper Rate-Book and the American Newspaper Directory.
What it is
An 1870 volume from Geo. P. Rowell & Co., the New York advertising agency, binding three works in one cover: The Men Who Advertise, the American Newspaper Rate-Book and the American Newspaper Directory. The first part is dozens of short biographies of men who began poor and grew rich through steady newspaper advertising: P. T. Barnum, Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, A. T. Stewart, George W. Childs, the Fairbanks scale makers, Steinway, and pill sellers such as Brandreth and Ayer. Between them sit short pieces on agencies, persistence, objections to agents and a page of aphorisms. The preface admits that not all who advertise make money. The rate-book reprints publishers' own pages of terms and prices; the directory lists papers by state and town with circulation, marking where a figure is only claimed. It ends with a ten-dollar ink recipe and the agency's own page offering estimates.
Why read it now
Read it as an early agency sales book rather than a manual. Its method still works: prove an invisible service with named clients' stories, concede the failure rate in the preface, and bind in a reference tool the buyer keeps on the desk, so the offer is opened every time a rate is checked. Some claims hold up. Bonner filling a page of the Herald with one line repeated is an early case for frequency and a distinctive style, and the note that an advertisement may pay weeks or months later, when the want arises, matches later work on memory and long-term effects such as Binet and Field's. Much has dated or fails. The biographies are survivor stories that leave out the advertisers who went broke, several fortunes rest on patent medicines sold as cures, and the promise that publisher commissions make the agent free to the advertiser hides whose interest he serves. Use it this way: when you build a case-study page, keep its candid preface and add what it leaves out, the failures and the numbers.
Passages worth keeping
Not all who advertise make money. It can be as easily thrown away in that direction as in any other, unless skill is employed in its use
الإعلان لا يضمن الربح، فالمال يمكن أن يضيع فيه كما يضيع في أي مجال آخر إذا غابت المهارة.
I put it in to attract your attention, and make you ask that question.
رد بونر على من سأله عن تكرار سطر واحد في صفحة كاملة: التكرار نفسه هو ما لفت نظرك ودفعك إلى السؤال.
an agent best serves his own interests by carefully observing those of his patrons.
يرى الكتاب أن الوكيل يخدم مصلحته حين يرعى مصلحة عملائه، وهو رد على من يتهم الوكلاء باختيار صحف رديئة طمعًا في العمولة.
weeks or months may elapse, and then, when the want arises, the article to be obtained immediately suggests the advertiser.
أثر الإعلان قد يتأخر أسابيع أو أشهرًا، ثم حين تظهر الحاجة يتذكر الناس صاحب الإعلان أولًا.
Don't attempt to advertise unless you have a good stock of a meritorious article.
لا تعلن إلا إذا كان لديك منتج جيد ومخزون كافٍ منه، فالإعلان يكشف ضعف المنتج بسرعة.
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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