Fowler's Publicity: An Encyclopedia of Advertising and Printing
A book of about 1,000 pages published in New York in 1897 by Nathaniel C. Fowler Jr., who notes that he is said to have written more advertising matter than anyone.
What it is
A book of about 1,000 pages published in New York in 1897 by Nathaniel C. Fowler Jr., who notes that he is said to have written more advertising matter than anyone. It is arranged in departments, not chapters. A history of publicity counts about 22,000 periodicals in North America, and 'Probable Proverbs' collects his short maxims, the 'Fowlerisms'. 'Great Successes' prints signed letters from advertisers such as Thomas J. Barratt of Pears' Soap and Thomas Doliber of Mellin's Food on how advertising paid. Further departments cover media from magazines to religious and trade papers, testing, continuity, headlines, humor, honesty, women as buyers, prices, signs, windows and dozens of single trades, plus paper, ink, engraving and lithography. 'Fifty Lessons' reprints 51 real ads under invented names beside rewritten, reset versions. The book states that no specimen in it was paid for.
Why read it now
Several maxims have held up. Fowler says stopping an advertisement breaks a connection that costs more to rebuild, and that dull times call for more advertising, not less; recession studies such as Peter Field's for the IPA find that brands holding share of voice through a downturn tend to gain market share. He says advertising brings people to the store but does not make them buy, close to today's split between brand building and sales activation. His testing chapter lists why key-coded addresses and 'mention this paper' requests mislead: buyers see an ad in several places and reply from memory. That is the attribution problem marketers still face, though controlled experiments now answer what he thought no method could. What has dated: the moral certainty, the unsourced claim that women buy 90 percent of all goods, the agent as a mere space jobber, and advice built for print. Use: study the 'Fifty Lessons' pairs, then rewrite one weak current ad in two versions, each built on a single point as his 'Profitable Singleness' chapter urges, and test them against each other.
Passages worth keeping
Advertising should precede the salesman, accompany him, and follow him.
الإعلان يمهّد الطريق لمندوب المبيعات قبل زيارته، ويسانده أثناءها، ويذكّر العميل به بعدها.
I, at least, have spent upwards of a million sterling and am not able to designate the best method.
معلن أنفق أكثر من مليون جنيه إسترليني يعترف بأنه لا يعرف أي وسيلة كانت الأفضل، لذلك يحكم على مجموع الجهد لا على كل وسيلة وحدها.
Not one in a hundred of the answerers of advertisements will take the pains to mention the publication they saw the advertisement in, even though the advertiser asks them to do so.
لا يمكن الاعتماد على ما يقوله العملاء عن مصدر معرفتهم بالإعلان، لأن أغلبهم لا يذكرونه حتى لو طُلب منهم ذلك.
One point remembered is better than a million points forgotten.
الإعلان الذي يركز على فكرة واحدة يبقى في الذاكرة، أما كثرة النقاط فتضيع كلها.
The headline is to bring the eye of the reader to the advertisement and induce him to read it; if there be no headline there may not be any reading.
وظيفة العنوان أن يجذب العين ويدفع القارئ إلى متابعة الإعلان، ومن دونه قد لا يُقرأ الإعلان أصلًا.
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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