Printers' Ink, January 12, 1928 (Vol. 142, No. 2)
A weekly issue of the New York advertising paper, filed for its news obituary of John E. Kennedy, who died on January 8, 1928.
What it is
A weekly issue of the New York advertising paper, filed for its news obituary of John E. Kennedy, who died on January 8, 1928. It calls him the father of "reason" copy and the man who defined advertising as "salesmanship in print" and records Albert Lasker's view that this changed advertising everywhere. The lead article, C. B. Larrabee's "Super-Advertising, Advertising's Worst Enemy", argues that superlatives, knocking copy, rival microphotographs and bought testimonials waste the believability advertising had won. Evidence: a home builder whose furnace, stoker and insulation ads promised savings adding up to more than three times his heating bill, and a publisher who found 17 per cent of over 1,500 ads not acceptable without question. Other pieces: Joseph M. Kraus on ad budgets as a forecast, D. M. Hubbard on a steel mill that turned donations into advertising, and Roy Dickinson on a Frenchman selling his family name.
Why read it now
Larrabee's diagnosis holds. Consumers discount claims that sound inflated, and advertising rules in most markets now require superlative and comparative claims to be substantiated. His furnace example is the sharpest lesson in the issue: each claim was believable alone, and the category's claims read together made all of them absurd. That is what happens when every brand in a sector promises the biggest saving. His publisher's point, that a comparative fight damages trust in the whole category, is still worth weighing before attack ads. The Kennedy obituary is a primary source for the phrase "salesmanship in print" and its credit to Kennedy through Lasker, and for Kennedy's view that copy is learned by experience, not in a school. What has dated: Larrabee writes as if believability was fully won before 1920, which the patent-medicine era contradicts; the testimonial debate predates disclosure rules for paid endorsements; and Kraus's bullish forecast ran less than two years before the 1929 crash. Use: before approving a claim, set it beside the three main competitors' claims, and if the numbers read together look absurd, replace the superlative with one specific, provable fact.
Passages worth keeping
They know that once that condition is with us again, advertising will have lost the one thing which makes it worth while, its believability.
إذا عاد الناس إلى القول إن الكلام مجرد إعلان، فقد خسر الإعلان الشيء الوحيد الذي يمنحه قيمة، وهو أن يُصدَّق.
A competitive fight always shakes the consumer’s faith in advertising.
حين يهاجم المنافسون بعضهم في الإعلانات، لا يخسر أحدهم وحده، بل تهتز ثقة المستهلك في الإعلان كله.
I believe the greatest enemies advertising has today are those who are weakening its believability.
الخطر الأكبر على الإعلان لا يأتي من نقاده، بل من المعلنين الذين يضعفون مصداقيته بالمبالغة.
Mr. Kennedy deplored the inanities and vanities of advertising which, in those days, was largely given over to pictures of factories and photographs of the advertisers who used their advertising to indulge in personal publicity.
رفض كينيدي الإعلان الذي يعرض صور المصانع ووجوه أصحابها تفاخرًا، وأراد إعلانًا يقدم للقارئ سببًا للشراء.
The only school open to the advanced student or practitioner of that advertising which is selling through print, is the great mother of all schools, personal experience.
يرى كينيدي أن من يريد إتقان البيع بالكلمة المطبوعة لا يجد مدرسة تعلّمه، فمعلمه الوحيد هو التجربة الشخصية.
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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