Printers' Ink, January 29, 1925 (Vol. 130, No. 5)
The filed piece in this issue of the New York advertising weekly is Bruce Barton's "A Million for Advertising", reprinted from Liberty, listing truths he says experience has proved.
What it is
The filed piece in this issue of the New York advertising weekly is Bruce Barton's "A Million for Advertising", reprinted from Liberty, listing truths he says experience has proved. He opens with spending: in 1923, 75 companies each spent over a quarter of a million dollars in 32 magazines, a gum maker who began with $32 spends $4,000,000 a year, and Henry Ford, long praised for relying on publicity, has set aside $7,000,000. The truths: advertising only hastens the success of a product good enough to succeed without it; it improves quality and cuts cost through volume, shown by a baking company that made one uniform loaf; it creates new habits; and when it stops, business crumbles, as with Rubifoam and with Pearline, sold for a reported $12,000. The fifth truth, on raising business standards, is cut off in the scan.
Why read it now
The strongest claim is the one Barton states as an axiom: advertising speeds up a good product and cannot rescue a bad one, because people will not buy twice something that failed them. Modern evidence agrees; repeat purchase decides most categories, and good advertising makes a poor product fail faster. His warning about stopping also holds. Ehrenberg-Bass studies of brands that go dark find that sales slide, usually gradually, and the Pearline story shows the cost of reading ad spend as waste on a ledger. But the evidence here is anecdote chosen by an agency head writing for a mass magazine; nobody counts the brands that stopped advertising and survived. The claim that advertising lowers prices through volume is true in some categories and not in others, where brand spend supports a price premium. The passage about the "savage" with no wants is dated and not worth repeating. Use: when someone proposes cutting the budget to zero, answer with a maintenance level of spend and a plan to track sales and branded search over the next two quarters.
Passages worth keeping
He knew that there is a vast difference between having the papers “say something about you” and using the papers to say the things which you want the public to know.
التغطية الصحفية المجانية ليست بديلًا عن الإعلان، لأن الصحف تقول ما تريده هي، والإعلان يقول ما تريد أنت أن يعرفه الناس.
nothing will succeed with advertising which is not good enough to succeed without it.
الإعلان لا يصنع نجاح منتج ضعيف، وإنما يسرّع نجاح منتج قادر على النجاح أصلًا.
Advertising, in other words, can perform no miracles. It cannot turn a bad product into a good one, nor persuade people to buy a second time something which proved unworthy on the first trial.
قد يجلب الإعلان المشتري الأول، لكنه لا يعيده مرة ثانية إذا خيّب المنتج ظنه.
They stopped advertising, and Rubifoam stopped, too.
أوقف أصحاب روبيفوم الإعلان ليوفروا المال، فتوقفت مبيعات المنتج معه وأخذ المنافسون مكانه.
But let that public consciousness be destroyed and all my factories are only moldering piles of steel and brick.
القيمة الحقيقية في معرفة الناس بالعلامة وطلبهم لها، فالمصانع يمكن إعادة بنائها، أما الحضور في أذهان الناس فإذا ضاع ضاعت قيمة المصانع.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
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