Financial Advertising for Commercial and Savings Banks, Trust, Title Insurance, and Safe Deposit Companies, Investment Houses
A handbook of nearly 1,000 pages by E. St. Elmo Lewis, then advertising manager of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, published in Indianapolis by Levey Bros.
What it is
A handbook of nearly 1,000 pages by E. St. Elmo Lewis, then advertising manager of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, published in Indianapolis by Levey Bros. & Company. The introduction attacks the banker's fetish of Dignity and credits the experience of 3,119 bankers, brokers and advertising men. After a history of advertising and a chapter on the banker's duty to the public, Lewis sets out three essentials, attracting attention, awakening interest and creating conviction, then argues that a bank must show a personality. His 35 chapters cover newspapers, the banking trade press, street cars, billboards, calendars and novelties, booklets, house organs, form letters, mailing lists, campaign plans, banking by mail at four per cent, artists and printers, new-business departments, agencies, publicity bureaus, competition, and savings banks, trust companies and bond houses. It closes with the 1907 panic and type-size tables. Real bank ads and letters are reproduced and critiqued.
Why read it now
Much of the core holds. His attention, interest and conviction sequence is an early form of AIDA, though since Vakratsas and Ambler's 1999 review there is little evidence that people pass through fixed steps in order, so treat it as a checklist, not a map of the mind. His case against Dignity, ads that list capital and deposits and say nothing to the reader, still describes the commonest failure in bank and fintech advertising. His rule that readers judge what they cannot check by what they can, told through a preacher who spoke of a steer giving milk, applies to copy in any expert field. The personality chapter, that people trust individuals more than corporations, fits the current use of named founders and advisers in financial brands. Dated: crowd psychology presented as settled science, racist asides, and approval of newspapers suppressing bad news during the 1907 panic. Use: rewrite one bank or finance ad so its first line speaks to the reader's problem, not the institution's size.
Passages worth keeping
There is a fetish before whom all Experience halts and trembles; it is called, for want of a better name, "Dignity."
الحرص المبالغ فيه على الوقار يمنع المصرفيين من الإعلان الفعال، ويصير عذرًا يحتمي به من لا يعرف كيف يعلن.
Publicity fails right here. It can only hope to attract the attention and hold a momentary interest.
مجرد الظهور لا يكفي، فالإعلان الذي لا يقنع القارئ بمنطق واضح لا يدفعه إلى الفعل.
Men appraise your knowledge of the things unknown to them by your knowledge of the things they know.
إذا أخطأت في تفصيل يعرفه القارئ فلن يثق بك فيما لا يعرفه، فالدقة في التفاصيل الصغيرة تبني المصداقية.
I always refuse to do business with people I don't know, and I wanted you to tell me your name so I'd know who you are.
العميلة تريد أن تعرف الشخص الذي يتعامل معها، ومن هذه القصة يبني الكاتب فكرته أن للبنك شخصية يجب أن تظهر في إعلانه.
There are always a thousand tongues to herald a failure, but success is taken as a matter of course.
الأخبار السيئة تنتشر بسرعة والنجاح لا يلفت أحدًا، لذلك على المؤسسة المالية أن تتحدث بنفسها في وقت الأزمات.
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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