Printers' Ink, Vol. 57, No. 9 (November 28, 1906)
A weekly issue of Printers' Ink, the American trade journal for advertisers.
What it is
A weekly issue of Printers' Ink, the American trade journal for advertisers. The lead story, signed Jas. H. Collins, interviews John E. Kennedy of the Ethridge-Kennedy agency on his new campaign for Snider's canned pork and beans. The first ad, headed "Baked Beans Are Never Sold in Tins", exposed the trade secret that canned "baked" beans were boiled, ahead of a pure food labeling law that from January 1907 would force the word onto labels. Kennedy lays out the motives underneath: win grocers with a side by side taste test against older stock, prepare the public for Snider's boiled process, and let the bean ads carry its catsup. He puts the budget at $40,000 a year. Other articles cover tone in ad layout, census figures on newspaper revenue, a New York paper that doubled its real estate advertising with growth stories, and agency service. Most pages are publishers' ads.
Why read it now
Read it for the Snider interview. It shows a campaign built on one disclosed fact with news value, timed to a change in the law, and aimed as much at the trade and the company's own doubtful salesmen as at shoppers: sixty-four wholesale grocers asked about it before the second ad ran. Kennedy's admission that early results were measured in interest rather than sales, and that the ads carried no key numbers, is a useful check on the idea that the reason-why school tracked everything. Naming a truth the whole category hides is still a strong positioning move when the claim is true and can be proven. What has dated: the sulphur and digestion claims would not pass a regulator now, and most advertising codes today require proof for comparative claims and forbid running down rivals. The tone article's point, that an ad stands out through unity of tone rather than size or blackness, still applies to a feed. Use: find a fact your category keeps quiet that a new rule or disclosure is about to expose, and say it first.
Passages worth keeping
What the situation called for was a stick of dynamite
كان كينيدي يبحث عن حقيقة صادمة تحرك سوقًا راكدة، لا عن حجة إضافية عن فوائد الفاصوليا.
This omission was partly intentional. By leaving something for readers to guess at and speculate about, we naturally secured interest in the advertisements to follow.
ترك سؤال بلا جواب في الإعلان الأول كان مقصودًا، ليشد القارئ إلى الإعلانات التالية.
Results from this campaign at the start had to be measured in interest rather than sales, because the advertising was put out nationally to create interest in a brand so new that few grocers had it.
حين يكون المنتج جديدًا وقليل الانتشار في المتاجر، يُقاس نجاح الحملة في بدايتها بالاهتمام الذي تثيره لا بالمبيعات.
it is not so much an advertising campaign as a broad policy for the conversion of an industry from what it is into something else, taking advantage of all the weak points of competitors.
الحملة في حقيقتها خطة لتغيير قواعد قطاع كامل مستفيدة من نقاط ضعف المنافسين، وليست مجرد إعلانات.
distinction in display is not a matter of bigness, or blackness, or whiteness, but unity of tone.
الإعلان لا يبرز بحجمه أو سواده أو بياضه، بل بانسجام درجاته في كتلة واحدة متماسكة.
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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