Printers' Ink, March 21, 1894 (Vol. 10, No. 12), with early retail ads by Claude C. Hopkins
A 32-page issue of Printers' Ink, the New York trade weekly of Geo. P. Rowell & Co., dated March 21, 1894.
What it is
A 32-page issue of Printers' Ink, the New York trade weekly of Geo. P. Rowell & Co., dated March 21, 1894. The file is kept for four short retail ads signed by Claude C. Hopkins and printed as models in Charles Austin Bates's department, Advertising for Retailers: a haberdasher's "54 Young Men" who have ordered figured shirts, a furnace ad built on a neighbor, "John Smith's New House", with a free book and a count of 480 furnaces in use, a one-day glassware sale and "3 Miles of Handkerchiefs". Bates also faults J. E. Kennedy's literary ads for the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg and asks for prices instead. Other pieces: a profile of the million-copy monthly Comfort, a Patent Office ruling that an advertising scheme cannot be patented, and a publisher's letter about clearing a dead stock of "Swedish wine of iron" with ads changed every three days.
Why read it now
Read it for the Hopkins ads, not for the issue as a whole. Each of his four pieces carries a hard number or a named person: 54 buyers, 480 furnaces, a price cut from 75 to 40 cents, three miles of stock, a sale that ends Monday night. That habit of specifics, plus the offer of a free book, is the core of what he wrote down 29 years later in Scientific Advertising, and later studies of precise versus round numbers in ad claims found that precise figures are judged more accurate. Bates's note on Kennedy makes the same point from the other side: fine prose that names no price does not sell. The Stevens letter adds a lesson on wear-out: a standing ad that never changes gets skipped, while the same space sold stock once the copy changed every three days. Dated: the puns, the doctor and patent medicine notices, and the circulation boasts that fill half the pages. Use: rewrite one ad so its headline holds a count, a name or a date, and test it against the general version.
Passages worth keeping
You cannot learn as much as he did about furnaces and want any other
من يعرف عن الأفران ما عرفه جون سميث لن يختار غير فرننا، ثم يعرض الإعلان كتيبًا يعلّم القارئ ما تعلمه جاره.
Fashion don't cost extra. Price is like plain ones.
الإعلان يرد على اعتراض السعر قبل أن يُطرح: القميص المنقوش العصري بسعر القميص السادة نفسه.
To-morrow our 75-cent tumblers go at 40 cents per dozen
تخفيض محدد بالأرقام وبيوم واحد، فالقارئ يعرف السعر القديم والسعر الجديد والموعد دون أن يسأل.
there is not anything so plain or so straight as prices
لا شيء في الإعلان أوضح ولا أصرح من السعر، والأسلوب الأدبي لا يغني عنه.
regular readers soon learn to regularly skip his advertisement
الإعلان الذي يبقى كما هو أسبوعًا بعد أسبوع يتعلم القراء تجاهله، فالتكرار دون تجديد يهدر المال.
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
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