Printers' Ink, January 7, 1903 (Volume 42, Number 1)
The first 1903 issue of the New York weekly for advertisers, published by Geo. P. Rowell & Co. The lead story shows Rosenbaum Brothers, Chicago grain brokers, replacing the dull daily circular with a card of about 100 words on one grain, posted within an hour of the market close to nearly 4,000 country buyers, cut a quarter inch wider than a standard postal card so it stands out in the morning mail.
What it is
The first 1903 issue of the New York weekly for advertisers, published by Geo. P. Rowell & Co. The lead story shows Rosenbaum Brothers, Chicago grain brokers, replacing the dull daily circular with a card of about 100 words on one grain, posted within an hour of the market close to nearly 4,000 country buyers, cut a quarter inch wider than a standard postal card so it stands out in the morning mail. "Themes" tells copywriters to split a product into its selling points and give each ad one. T. Russell reports that the goodwill of Dr. King's Pills, unadvertised for years, sold at auction for £5,000. Wolstan Dixey describes his correspondence course: say what the product does, and judge advertising by its cost per reply. Also: the Lehigh Valley Railroad, an ad contest won by a Jonson ink ad with twelve testimonials, and George Ethridge's art criticism.
Why read it now
The Rosenbaum cards teach three things that still work in B2B: send the buyer useful facts he cannot get elsewhere, keep each message to one topic, and make the format stand out physically in a crowded inbox. Each card also offered a small free item, which turned readers into correspondents and then into consignments. "Themes" is the one-point-per-ad rule later agencies built their briefs on. Dixey's advice to tell what the product will do, not what it is, is now standard benefit copy, and his cost-per-reply test is the ancestor of cost per lead. Russell's story of pills that kept selling long after their ads stopped needs care: later studies of brands that go dark find that sales usually decline year by year, and Russell himself expected competition to kill such lines. Dated: Dixey's trick of teaching readers the word "assimilated" to sell patent medicine is now a regulated health claim. Use: for a trade audience, send a short daily note on one topic within an hour of the market or event it covers, with one small offer that invites a reply.
Passages worth keeping
Too many people think that advertising is merely literature or art, but as a matter of fact it is nothing but information, and the more useful and vital you can make it the greater will be its advertising value.
الإعلان في جوهره معلومة، وكلما كانت المعلومة أنفع للقارئ زادت قيمة الإعلان، لا بجمال الكتابة أو الرسم.
Of all systems known there is none so constantly helpful as that of dividing the commodity into its several themes and making one of them carry the burden of a single ad.
قسّم المنتج إلى نقاطه المختلفة، واجعل كل إعلان يحمل نقطة واحدة، فتحصل على إعلانات أقوى وسلسلة متنوعة.
I believe in telling what it will do, letting the reader infer what it is from what it will do.
ابدأ بما سيفعله المنتج للقارئ، وسيفهم القارئ بنفسه ما هو المنتج.
Advertising is not so much a matter of getting business through the use of literature and space as a matter of getting business at a certain cost.
المهم ليس أن يجلب الإعلان عملاء فقط، بل أن يجلبهم بتكلفة مقبولة يمكن حسابها.
Isn’t it an extraordinary evidence of the permanent usefulness of advertising?
يرى راسل في دواء ما زال يُباع بعد توقف إعلانه بسنوات دليلًا على أن أثر الإعلان القديم يبقى طويلًا.
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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