Printers' Ink, September 30, 1908 (Vol. 65, No. 1), with Kicks and Halfpence by Earnest Elmo Calkins
The September 30, 1908 issue of Printers' Ink (volume 65, number 1), the weekly 'journal for advertisers'.
What it is
The September 30, 1908 issue of Printers' Ink (volume 65, number 1), the weekly 'journal for advertisers'. The lead article, 'The Written Plan of Campaign' by John Irving Romer, argues that an agency should study the product and its distribution before writing a line, credits Charles Austin Bates with the method, and tells of a maker who believed his goods were in every store and was in about 20 per cent of them. Earnest Elmo Calkins's column 'Kicks and Halfpence' attacks imitation: magazines copying the Saturday Evening Post's size, and brands naming themselves after rivals, Iwanta after Uneeda, Ivy after Ivory. Other pieces cover the modern farmer, a Harmsworth director's view of American ads, a baby photo contest that sold Spim soap, and letters from advertisers who kept spending through the 1907 panic. The cover is a first-person ad for the Kansas Weekly Capital signed by its publisher.
Why read it now
Two ideas here still hold. Romer's order of work, product first, distribution second, advertising last, is the step most briefs still skip, and his store count is the cheapest audit a brand can run: the maker who claimed every store was in about one in five. Research on physical availability agrees that distribution often limits growth more than copy does. Calkins's case against imitation holds in part. A name that echoes the leader, like Iwanta for Uneeda, starts behind, and he is right that years of advertising, not the word itself, made Sapolio mean scouring soap. He overreaches when he treats all borrowing as failure; matching a category's look sometimes helps buyers recognise what they are looking at. The panic letters come from media sellers praising their own results and prove little, though later recession studies lean, with caveats, toward the view that brands which keep advertising gain ground. Use: before any Saudi campaign, write a one-page plan that covers product and distribution first, and count the outlets that really stock the product before buying media.
Passages worth keeping
The old-fashioned way of handling advertising was to begin with the advertising. The modern plan puts the advertising last
الإعلان هو الخطوة الأخيرة لا الأولى، فإذا لم يكن المنتج والتوزيع سليمين خيّب الإعلان الآمال مهما كان جيدًا.
Publishers, like advertisers, do not appreciate the individuality of their own products.
كثير من الناشرين والمعلنين يتخلون عما يميز منتجهم ليشبهوا منافسًا ناجحًا، فيخسرون أثمن ما لديهم.
Uneeda begat Iwanta, and Iwanta begat Uwanta, and Uwanta begat Ilika.
يسخر الكاتب من سلسلة أسماء تجارية قلّد كل منها الذي قبله، فلم يبق لأي منها شخصية خاصة.
It is the advertising that has made the name “Sapolio” a synonym for a scouring soap.
الاسم لا ينجح بذاته، بل يكتسب معناه من الإعلان المتواصل، ولذلك لا ينفع أن تطلب اسمًا مثل اسم منافسك الناجح.
We were agreeably surprised in receiving 10 per cent. better returns traceable to this investment in advertising space than from the advertising of the previous year.
مجلة واصلت الإعلان وزادت إنفاقها خلال أزمة 1907، فوجدت عائدًا أعلى من العام السابق، وتنسب ذلك إلى استمرارها ثلاثين عامًا.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
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