Advertising & Selling, 30th Year (June 26 to December 25, 1920)
A bound run of the New York weekly Advertising & Selling for the second half of 1920: the first 27 issues of its 30th year, June 26 to December 25, about 1,275 scanned pages.
What it is
A bound run of the New York weekly Advertising & Selling for the second half of 1920: the first 27 issues of its 30th year, June 26 to December 25, about 1,275 scanned pages. It records a boom turning into the 1920 to 1921 slump. Early lead articles cover export marketing at U.S. Steel Products, freight rates, and National Biscuit salesmen who carry the company's ads to grocers. Edward J. Noble credits advertising and an easel display carton for the spread of Life Savers. Paul W. Kearney complains that polished copy has dropped the selling load, and a writer signing himself The Outsider replies. A contractors' equipment maker tells how it stopped all advertising in 1919, found that its magazine ads and direct mail had no shared aim, and rebuilt both. By December the lead is It Pays to Advertise Now, a banker's case for spending through the depression.
Why read it now
This is a case file on advertising in a downturn, written while it happened. The December argument, keep spending when buyers hold back, has support: studies from McGraw-Hill's analysis of the 1981 to 1982 recession onward find that firms which held their budgets grew sales and share faster than those that cut. The contractors' equipment story is the more useful lesson. The firm paused spending in order to audit, and found the fault was not the media but ads that described construction and attacked a rival instead of helping the agents who sold. Noble's point that the package and the counter display do advertising work is standard retail practice now. The Kearney debate, hard selling points against the overall impression, is still open and worth having. What has dated is the belief that advertising alone could lift a national depression. Use: in a slow quarter, list every ad and sales tool, write the one objective each serves, and cut what has none rather than what is merely expensive.
Passages worth keeping
Having a product of unquestioned quality value we have never had to ask the impossible of our advertising.
الإعلان لا يعوض ضعف المنتج، وحين يكون المنتج جيدًا لا يُطلب من الإعلان المستحيل.
He pounded the desk and exclaimed that general impression and prestige and the other ethereal things were all right, but that advertising ought to sell our machines.
مدير المبيعات يرفض الإعلان الذي يكتفي بالهيبة والانطباع العام، ويطالب بإعلان يساعد فعلًا على بيع الآلات.
Is it strange that when your salesman calls on Broad to take an order for a new product, which you have been featuring in various publications for several weeks, Broad can truthfully say he has never heard of it?
التاجر الذي سيبيع منتجك قد لا يرى إعلانك أبدًا، فلا بد أن يوصله المندوب إليه بنفسه.
Modern advertising seems to have divorced the old-time merchandising load.
الإعلان الحديث صار يهتم بالأناقة والثقافة وترك مهمته الأصلية، وهي تقديم أسباب الشراء.
The consumer is the key to the whole situation. He must be stirred out of his apathy.
في الركود يؤجل المستهلك الشراء انتظارًا لانخفاض الأسعار، ومهمة الإعلان أن يحرك رغبته من جديد.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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