Printers' Ink, October 18, 1923 (Vol. 125, No. 3), with Judging Copy by Salesmanship Standards, a report of Claude C. Hopkins' talk
A weekly issue of Printers' Ink dated 18 October 1923.
What it is
A weekly issue of Printers' Ink dated 18 October 1923. The filed item is short: "Judging Copy by Salesmanship Standards", a one-column report of a talk by Claude C. Hopkins, president of Lord & Thomas, who criticised business-paper ads shown on slides to the Engineering Advertisers Association in Chicago on 8 October. The quoted paragraphs give his rules: you get a reader's attention once, so tell him everything; write headlines as a newspaperman would; judge advertising only as salesmanship; the maker's name matters little to a selfish reader; and without traced returns one man's opinion of copy is a guess. The rest of the issue holds longer cases: Gold Dust sales flat under the Twins' stunts, then rising with reason-why copy; La Touraine Coffee running seven words, "You might as well have the best"; and Nucoa renaming itself The Best Foods to shed the word substitute.
Why read it now
These are the rules Hopkins set out the same year in Scientific Advertising, and most still hold. Headlines that tell readers something they want, copy written the way a salesman talks, and distrust of any opinion not backed by traced returns all match what direct-response and search advertising measure today. "Tell everything" suits considered purchases and response ads; it suits a short video in a feed far less, and long-run studies by Binet and Field favour emotional, broad-reach work for brand growth. His weakest claim is that the maker's name is unimportant: later work on distinctive brand assets shows buyers must be able to tell whose ad they saw. The Gold Dust case in the same issue tests both sides: famous mascot stunts won praise but not sales, reason-why copy lifted shipments, and the company later brought the Twins back to protect the trademark. The Nucoa rename shows a company name can carry a meaning that blocks a new product. Use: read the headlines of your last five ads and ask whether each tells the buyer something he wants to read.
Passages worth keeping
I expect to get a man’s attention but once and when I get it I talk his interests, not my own.
الانتباه فرصة لا تتكرر، فإذا حصلت عليها فتكلم عن مصلحة القارئ لا عن نفسك.
The headline ought to tell a man something he wants to read.
وظيفة العنوان أن يعد القارئ بشيء يهمه فعلًا، لا أن يكون زينة أو لعبًا بالكلمات.
Advertising must be judged entirely by the standards of salesmanship.
السؤال الوحيد عن أي إعلان: هل كان سيبيع لو قاله بائع وجهًا لوجه؟
The reader is entirely selfish; he doesn’t care much about the manufacturer’s name.
القارئ يبحث عما ينفعه هو، ولا يهتم كثيرًا بمن صنع المنتج.
We kept the Gold Dust Twins out of the picture for malicious and deliberate purposes.
أبعدت الشركة شخصيتيها الشهيرتين عن الإعلان عمدًا، لأن الاستعراض كان يجذب الانتباه دون أن يرفع المبيعات.
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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