Printers' Ink, January 3, 1894 (Vol. 10, No. 1)
The first issue of 1894, 32 pages, printed in the slump after the Panic of 1893.
What it is
The first issue of 1894, 32 pages, printed in the slump after the Panic of 1893. The cover, a Rowell agency ad, argues that trade is dullest for those who stop advertising. A. S. Porter explains why the weekly editions of big dailies are losing farm readers to the agricultural press. Edward Hurst Brown tours Philadelphia's Christmas street advertising: a sandwich man in minstrel dress, a Santa wagon whose signs held too much text to read, a tailor writing personal letters with cloth samples to doctors and clergymen. Virginia Frazee calls New York dry-goods copy the worst in the country, a wall of "exceptional values". T. B. Russell reports from London on evening papers and sandwich men, a New York Sun piece asks women which parts of the paper they read, Isaac Gans sets rules for salespeople, and the Directory explains its circulation ratings.
Why read it now
The cover's claim, that slow times reward the advertisers who keep going, has modern support: recession studies from McGraw-Hill in the 1980s to Binet and Field's later work find that brands holding spend gain share while rivals cut. The evidence is about share, not guaranteed profit, and here the claim comes from an agency selling space. Frazee's attack on "exceptional values" copy is an early form of a durable finding: when every competitor prints the same empty claim, none is noticed, and the one ad in a fresh style gets read, as her three women readers showed. Brown's Santa wagon shows an outdoor rule still taught: a moving sign carries a few words at most. The women's dinner conversation is informal but useful: readers treat ads as news when they carry prices, dates and sales. Dated: the tone toward the Black sandwich man, the "old maid" jokes, and a patent-medicine copy-book aimed at children, which would now be banned. Use: before a sale ad goes out, delete every claim a competitor could print unchanged.
Passages worth keeping
However dull it may be at any time, it will always be dullest with those who fail to advertise their wares.
في أوقات الركود يكون الركود أشد عند من يتوقف عن الإعلان، أما من يستمر فيأخذ النصيب الأكبر من السوق المتاحة.
The large muslin signs on either side had so much reading matter that they failed their purpose, for no one had time to read them.
اللافتة المتحركة التي تحمل كلامًا كثيرًا تفشل، لأن المارة لا يملكون وقتًا لقراءتها.
Do New York advertisers believe that advertising is the one exception to the rule that what is worth doing at all is worth doing well?
الكاتبة تتعجب من معلنين كبار يكتبون إعلاناتهم على عجل وبلا عناية، كأن الإعلان وحده لا يستحق الإتقان.
Some of them read a few things; a few of them read all; but all of them read some things.
النساء يقرأن الإعلانات بدرجات مختلفة، لكن كل واحدة منهن تقرأ شيئًا منها، فالإعلان يصل إلى الجميع بطريقة ما.
Shoppers nowadays are intelligent. They know well the value of merchandise, and, therefore, it does more harm than good to enlarge too much on what you are showing.
المشتري يعرف قيمة البضاعة، لذلك يضر الإطناب في مدحها أكثر مما ينفع، والأفضل شرح موجز ثم ترك الحكم له.
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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