Printers' Ink, August 19, 1926 (Vol. 136, No. 8)
An issue of the New York advertising weekly.
What it is
An issue of the New York advertising weekly. The filed piece is "The Why of Reason Why Copy" by Albert D. Lasker, chairman of Lord & Thomas and Logan, written after he stepped back from daily agency work. His thesis: every dramatic advertising success rests on ordinary common sense. He tells how he hired Claude C. Hopkins after Cyrus Curtis showed him the Schlitz ad about bottles cleaned with live steam, a step every brewery took but none had advertised; Schlitz rose from about third to first in three years. He contrasts Montgomery Ward's plain money-saving copy with Sears, Roebuck's "Greater than Aladdin's lamp", recalls selling the men behind Hudson and Overland cars, and shows Palmolive turning "no animal fats" into "Soap from Trees". Other pieces: Morris Fishbein on medicine and advertising, Carnation joining the joke about contented cows, and W. K. Kellogg's first $150 appropriation.
Why read it now
Lasker's best lesson is the Schlitz story: the fact that bores the maker often interests the buyer most, and the first brand to state a truth common to its category owns it, because rivals who repeat it look like copies. That preemptive claim still works, though regulators today can treat an implied exclusive claim as misleading, so state it plainly and do not suggest you alone do it. His advice to say what a product is rather than what it is not has support in research showing people often forget the "no" and remember the ingredient; still, free-from claims sell where the missing thing is feared. Two claims have not held. He calls long-term advertising a deceiving salesman and says there is no guesswork in results. Work by Les Binet and Peter Field shows brand effects build over years alongside short-term sales, and measurement remains uncertain. Use: walk through your production or service process with the writer, list every step competitors take for granted, and build one ad around the step a buyer would find surprising, framed positively.
Passages worth keeping
I did not say Schlitz did it exclusively nor that no other brewer did it. But no other brewer had said it up to that time
لم يدّعِ هوبكنز أن شليتز وحدها تنظف زجاجاتها بالبخار، لكنه كان أول من قالها، فصارت الفكرة ملكًا لها.
in writing common-sense copy the advertising man is obliged to tell the things that interest the manufacturer least because they interest the consumer most
ما يراه الصانع تفصيلًا عاديًا لا يستحق الذكر قد يكون بالضبط ما يشد المشتري، فعلى الكاتب أن يبحث عنه.
Negative advertising does not pay, as most advertisers now know.
يرى لاسكر أن الإعلان الذي يقول ما ليس في المنتج لا يبيع، ولذلك صيغت رسالة بالموليف بصورة إيجابية عن مصدر زيوتها.
advertising is twin to that most deceiving of all commercial types: the fine appearing, fine talking salesman who sells himself better than his line.
يشبّه لاسكر الإعلان الذي يَعِد بنتائج على المدى البعيد بالبائع الأنيق الذي يسوّق نفسه أكثر مما يبيع بضاعته.
For no business that could not succeed without advertising will ever succeed because of it. Advertising multiplies and hastens success.
الإعلان يضاعف نجاح العمل الجيد ويعجّله، لكنه لا يصنع نجاحًا لعمل لا يقوم على أساس سليم.
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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