Printers' Ink, January 4, 1923 (Vol. 122, No. 1)
The first 1923 issue of the New York weekly for advertisers.
What it is
The first 1923 issue of the New York weekly for advertisers. The N. W. Ayer & Son cover, "Armor against fate", shows off its Lyon bumper account. Roy Dickinson asks where 1923's new advertisers will come from and answers: local makers with a good name, like the jewellers of Attleboro and shoemakers of Brockton. Californians, Inc. advertises the whole state. The Ilg company interviews home buyers of its factory fan, Julius Rosenwald among them, learns they want kitchen smells gone, then tests it in newspapers. Ferris hams try to put flavor into black-and-white copy; Schieren has used a duck to say "waterproof" for sixteen years. Other items: whether copywriters should sign ads; Pearline, a $500,000 advertiser in 1904, reportedly sold for $12,000 in 1914; Gilbert Kinney on how loyalty forms; and editorials on Sunkist's frost year, business cycles and "trick phrases and few facts".
Why read it now
Several pieces are early versions of rules marketers now treat as settled. The Ilg story is customer research before copy: the firm asked why people bought, heard "cooking smells", and found a home market it had missed, which is what jobs-to-be-done interviews do today. Pearline shows brand decay: demand built by heavy advertising lingered in rural stores for years after support stopped while its value shrank, which matches measured sales decay once spend ends. The Sunkist editorial shows quality control protecting advertising: after the 1922 frost only sound fruit was shipped, and a crop of 53 per cent brought 90 per cent of the previous year's money. Kinney's point that ads rarely prompt action on first sight, and that executives misjudge ads by testing them on themselves, fits current work on low-attention processing. The Duxbak duck is a sixteen-year distinctive asset. What has dated: the case against signed copy, now that creator-led ads carry names, and the editorial's claim that a depression costs only 10 per cent of income, which the 1930s disproved. Use: before writing, interview five recent buyers and ask why they bought.
Passages worth keeping
A careful analysis of sales figures often can reveal an interesting story and uncover rich markets that might not be thought of in the natural course of events.
مراجعة أرقام المبيعات بعناية قد تكشف عملاء وأسواقًا لم تخطر على بال الشركة، فتتغير وجهة الإعلان كلها.
Advertising can sell. It does not create only consumer acceptance. But only rarely does it produce immediate action the first time the reader sees it.
الإعلان يبيع فعلًا، لكن أثره يتراكم مع التكرار، ونادرًا ما يدفع القارئ إلى الشراء من أول مرة.
The reader promptly puts on his defensive armor when he realizes he is being sold something.
القارئ يتحفظ ويقاوم حين يشعر أن أحدًا يحاول أن يبيعه، ولذلك يجب أن تصل الرسالة بهدوء.
The momentum imparted by years of advertising will carry a product along for some time.
سنوات الإعلان تترك أثرًا يبقي المنتج في السوق فترة بعد توقفه، لكن هذا الأثر يتلاشى في النهاية.
It goes without saying that a product cannot well be advertised unless it possesses a fairly uniform quality.
الإعلان لا ينفع منتجًا تتفاوت جودته، فالقطعة المعيبة تهدم الثقة التي بناها الإعلان.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
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