Printers' Ink, July 29, 1926 (Vol. 136, No. 5)
An issue of the New York advertising weekly that opens with the first of Albert D. Lasker's 1926 articles, "Salesmanship in Print".
What it is
An issue of the New York advertising weekly that opens with the first of Albert D. Lasker's 1926 articles, "Salesmanship in Print". Lasker recalls joining Lord & Thomas when agencies mostly sold space and no one could tell him what advertising was. In 1905 a note came up from the café downstairs, signed John E. Kennedy, offering to explain. His answer was three words, "salesmanship in print", and his second lesson was reason why copy. Kennedy took apart a washing machine ad headed "Don't be chained to the wash tub" and replaced it with "Let This Washing Machine Pay for Itself": a horse-trading story, four weeks' free trial, and payment out of the 60 cents a week saved. Cost per inquiry fell from about $20 to a few cents. The agency then took mail-order accounts to learn copy through keyed tests. Also here: Fortnum & Mason's credit letters.
Why read it now
Two ideas here have held up. The first is testing: Kennedy's point that equally good headlines pull very differently, and that nobody can predict which will win, is what large-scale online experiments keep showing, and his weekly review of keyed results is the ancestor of cost-per-lead reporting. The second is the washer offer: a free trial paid for out of the savings removes the buyer's risk and states the benefit in money, a structure used today by subscription trials and by solar and efficiency firms. Kennedy's reading of the old ad also holds: do not cast the buyer as a drudge she will not admit to being. What has dated: his claim that advertising is salesmanship in print "and nothing else" leaves out advertising that works by keeping a brand easy to recall, which Ehrenberg-Bass research suggests is most of it. His dislike of instalments is also out of date; in Saudi Arabia, Tabby and Tamara put split payments on the checkout page. Use: write three headlines for one offer, split-test them on the same audience and budget, and cut the losers every week.
Passages worth keeping
Advertising was that in 1905 when Kennedy told it; it was that before anyone had ever told me; it will always be that, and nothing else.
يرى لاسكر أن تعريف كينيدي للإعلان بأنه بيع بالكلمة المطبوعة صحيح في كل زمن، ولا يقبل له تعريفًا آخر.
Having defined that advertising is salesmanship in print, then how do you apply salesmanship in print? By giving the reason why the people should want the goods.
إذا كان الإعلان بيعًا فأداته هي الأسباب: أن تشرح للناس لماذا ينبغي أن يريدوا السلعة.
She won’t know it consciously, but subconsciously she won’t want to write and admit that she has been reduced to such bestial servility.
الإعلان الذي يصوّر المشترية في صورة مهينة يجعلها تتجنب الرد، لأن الرد اعتراف بتلك الصورة.
a man could have his problem worked out and might write a half dozen headlines that would seem equally good, but that when he put them before the public, the public responded to one as it didn’t to another.
قد تبدو عدة عناوين متساوية في نظر الكاتب، لكن الجمهور يستجيب لواحد منها ويتجاهل غيره، ولا سبيل لمعرفة ذلك إلا بالاختبار.
It was all run by bookkeeping
كانت قرارات تكرار الإعلان أو إيقافه تُتخذ كل أسبوع من سجل النتائج، لا من الرأي والذوق.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
If this library is useful, leave an email
We send new patterns, ads, and notes when we add them. Name and phone are optional.
You are on the list
We will write when we add more library material.