Advertising & Selling, 29th Year (December 6, 1919 to June 19, 1920)
A bound run of the New York weekly Advertising & Selling: 29 issues from December 6, 1919 (No. 24) to June 19, 1920 (No. 52), about 1,550 scanned pages from the start of the postwar boom.
What it is
A bound run of the New York weekly Advertising & Selling: 29 issues from December 6, 1919 (No. 24) to June 19, 1920 (No. 52), about 1,550 scanned pages from the start of the postwar boom. The opening ad, a Chicago Tribune page, sells newspaper space by its weight in paper and ink. Articles ask whether copywriters should come from selling, how to put a dollar value on good will, and whether a trade name should become a common noun, with celluloid as the example. Louis F. Swift explains his meatpacking firm's institutional ads against public hostility. Ralph Bevin Smith warns that rude staff in a seller's market destroy good will built by years of advertising. Columbia psychologist Arthur I. Gates says most copy is written to please other admen. George French's anniversary history credits Kate Griswold, who owned its predecessor, Profitable Advertising.
Why read it now
The problems in this volume return in every boom. Smith's warning holds: service research links how customers are treated to repeat purchase and word of mouth, and a shortage is when that treatment is tested. Gates names an error psychologists later measured as the false consensus effect, the habit of assuming others share our tastes; it is why pre-testing copy with real buyers beats approval inside the team. The good will debate was settled by accounting rules that now book acquired brands as intangible assets. What has dated is F. W. Wilson's advice to let a brand name become a common noun. The 1921 aspirin ruling against Bayer, and later the escalator and thermos cases, show that a generic name loses its legal protection, so owners now guard the name as an adjective. Use: before a price rise or a stock shortage, script how staff and channels answer customers, and test new copy on buyers outside the marketing team.
Passages worth keeping
The mere ability to work with words and play with phrases is utterly valueless in advertising work unless accompanied by the merchandising instinct
مهارة اللغة وحدها لا تبيع، وكاتب الإعلان يحتاج إلى فهم البيع والتوزيع والناس قبل أن يحتاج إلى العبارات الجميلة.
it costs less in advertising to sell a well-known product, a product that has been well advertised, than to sell a new product or one that has not been well advertised.
المنتج المعروف يكلف بيعه إعلانيًا أقل من المنتج الجديد، لأن الإعلان السابق ما زال يعمل لصالحه.
Advertising is commonly thought of only in connection with selling commodities, but recently advertising space has been employed extensively to sell ideas.
الإعلان لا يبيع السلع فقط، بل يمكن أن يبيع فكرة عن الشركة نفسها ويدافع عنها أمام الرأي العام.
edifices of good will, built up through long years of unswerving toil and heavy investment in advertising space, specialty and dealer help, are crumbling down through a few short months
سمعة بنتها الشركة بسنوات من العمل والإنفاق على الإعلان قد تنهار في أشهر قليلة بسبب سوء معاملة العملاء.
Advertisements are more often written, I fear, to satisfy the judgment of a skilled advertising man or to satisfy certain technical rules and principles than to really produce a desired reaction from the general public.
كثير من الإعلانات تُكتب لتعجب المختصين وتوافق القواعد الفنية، لا لتحرك الجمهور العادي، والمعيار الصحيح هو رد فعل الجمهور.
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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