Printers' Ink, September 3, 1914 (Vol. 88, No. 10)
An issue of the New York weekly for advertisers, printed a month into the First World War. The lead is an advance chapter from Earnest Elmo Calkins's rewritten The Business of Advertising: a tour of the service agency's eight departments (business-getting, trade investigation, the plan man, copy, layout and art, typography, the rate man, checking), with an organization chart.
What it is
An issue of the New York weekly for advertisers, printed a month into the First World War. The lead is an advance chapter from Earnest Elmo Calkins's rewritten The Business of Advertising: a tour of the service agency's eight departments (business-getting, trade investigation, the plan man, copy, layout and art, typography, the rate man, checking), with an organization chart. Calkins says each campaign turns on one keynote idea and that national advertising is wasted where distribution is thin. Much of the rest is about the war: George B. Cortelyou urging firms to keep advertising, food brands pledging no war prices, and Wanamaker's story-form ad about its Paris buyer racing to Havre with the new fashions. Other pieces cover J. L. Hudson's exposition of nationally advertised goods in Detroit, Sherwin-Williams dealer mailing lists, clerk training at Armstrong Cork, and G. D. Crain on questions replacing commands in copy.
Why read it now
Calkins's keynote idea is today's single-minded proposition, and his rule that national ads wait for distribution matches the modern evidence that mental and physical availability have to grow together. The most useful page is L. R. Greene's: when Sherwin-Williams checked the lists dealers sent in for mailings, the names were mostly regular customers who would have bought anyway. That is the incrementality problem that holdout tests measure now. The war pieces make the case for holding spend in a downturn, which later studies of recessions support, though Cortelyou argues it from confidence, not data. Wanamaker's ad turned news into proof by putting the buyer's hampers on display. Crain's case for questions over commands is an opinion to test; many modern call-to-action tests favour a plain instruction. What has dated: the commission-based agency the chart assumes, the plate logistics, and Calkins's view that the agency knows the product better than its maker, which is also a pitch for his firm. Use: write the keynote in one sentence, check the product can be bought where the ads run, and hold out part of any customer list to measure lift.
Passages worth keeping
In nearly all successful advertising there is a certain keynote idea. To teach the public this keynote is the main purpose of advertising.
وراء كل إعلان ناجح فكرة واحدة تقوده، ومهمة الإعلان أن يرسخ هذه الفكرة في ذهن الجمهور.
Very few advertisers know their goods as well as other people do because they are constantly seeing them from the factory side and not from the public side.
الصانع يرى منتجه من داخل المصنع، أما الناس فيرونه من موقع المشتري، ولذلك قد يفهمه غيره أفضل منه حين يتعلق الأمر بالإعلان.
It is a part of the cumulative effect of advertising that the same advertisement should always make its appearance in the same typographical dress.
أثر الإعلان يتراكم حين يظهر بالشكل نفسه في كل وسيلة، فالثبات في الخط والتصميم جزء من بناء التذكر.
they probably would have bought it anyway, as they were regular customers of the dealer and took his recommendations when making their purchases.
كانت قوائم التجار مليئة بزبائن دائمين يشترون أصلًا، فلم تضف الحملة البريدية إليهم مبيعات جديدة تُذكر.
Human nature, as a matter of fact, is not calculated to respond easily to the command.
الناس بطبعهم لا يستجيبون بسهولة للأوامر، ولهذا يلجأ بعض المعلنين إلى السؤال بدل صيغة الأمر.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
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