Fortune, December 1930 (Volume 2, Number 6)
The December 1930 issue of Fortune (volume 2, number 6), the $1 business monthly Henry R. Luce edited for Time Inc., in 157 scanned pages.
What it is
The December 1930 issue of Fortune (volume 2, number 6), the $1 business monthly Henry R. Luce edited for Time Inc., in 157 scanned pages. The editorial side is long unsigned stories: the Behn brothers and International Telephone & Telegraph, armored cars, Pittsburgh, the Guinness family and its Dublin brewery, modern stained glass, skyscrapers, what a New York debutante season costs, and the nation's $6,000,000,000 Christmas bill. The piece for marketers is 'Radio Advertising', which works the audience arithmetic step by step (13,478,600 sets, Crossley's 3.1 listeners per set, 23 to 25 families in 100 hearing a good evening program) and then tests sales cases: Betty Jane candy, Bobolink stockings, Benrus watches, Lucky Strike. Advertising fills about half the pages: Carrier's Manufactured Weather, Packard, Van Cleef & Arpels, Milky Way on posters, and a Cowan & Dengler house ad about local farm copy written for 26 zones.
Why read it now
The radio article is the reason to read this issue. Its method still holds: start from sets owned, cut to sets in use, then to sets tuned to your program, and distrust the seller's own reach figure. Fortune rejects the networks' claim of 90 per cent coverage because Chevrolet bought 138 stations, which it would not need if the claim were true; the same test works on any platform's reach estimate today. Its three answers to selling inside entertainment (make the show good enough to earn the pitch, keep the message short, let paid print carry the long argument) match how sponsored podcasts and creator deals work now. Two ads carry lasting lessons: Cowan & Dengler's local copy by zone, and a job seeker's claim that copy written into the product beats copy written about it, shown with dated coffee and the Elgin Parisiennes. Dated: the network figures, the single sales stories with no comparison, and the society pages. Use: before buying a Saudi podcast or creator sponsorship, rebuild the audience with the same three cuts and check the seller's number against what large buyers actually purchase.
Passages worth keeping
Radio advertising is still at a point in which it is possible to claim everything and to deny everything, and very difficult to prove anything.
في بدايات أي وسيلة إعلانية جديدة يستطيع كل طرف أن يدعي ما يشاء، لأن أدوات القياس المستقلة لم توجد بعد.
But radio’s tremendous potentialities as an advertising medium will never be adequately realized until the broadcaster accepts the advertiser as something more than a snake of commercialism in an Eden of entertainment.
لن تنجح الوسيلة إعلانيًا ما دام أصحابها يرون المعلن دخيلًا يفسد متعة الجمهور، لا شريكًا يمول المحتوى.
In short, a superlative program will atone for much salesmanship.
إذا كان المحتوى ممتازًا تحمّل الجمهور قدرًا كبيرًا من كلام البيع المباشر دون أن ينصرف عنه.
The writer of this advertisement thinks that writing copy into a product is more important today than writing copy about it.
الفكرة التي تُبنى في المنتج نفسه، مثل تاريخ على علبة القهوة، تعطي الإعلان ما يقوله قبل أن يبدأ الكاتب.
Business has invaded Christmas and Christmas has invaded Business.
المواسم الدينية والاجتماعية صارت مواسم تجارية كذلك، ولم يعد ممكنًا فصل المناسبة عن الإنفاق المرتبط بها.
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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