Printers' Ink, October 20, 1910 (Vol. 73, No. 3), with A Further Brief for an Advertising Institute by John E. Kennedy
A weekly issue of Printers' Ink dated 20 October 1910, built around a debate.
What it is
A weekly issue of Printers' Ink dated 20 October 1910, built around a debate. At the Sphinx Club dinner in the Waldorf-Astoria on 11 October, John E. Kennedy, newly back at Lord & Thomas, argued for an Institute for Advertising Research. Advertisers waste money because each learns alone, he said; a neutral, funded institute should gather their results as medicine pooled its cases, and would do for advertising what the cyanide process did for low-grade gold ore. Lord & Thomas pledged $5,000 toward a $50,000 fund. The issue prints only extracts of his address, then the pushback: Thomas Balmer says advertisers will never share private records and proposes studying ten years of published ads instead; Len M. Frailey of Campbell's Soups calls the plan Utopian; an editorial judges it probably impractical. Other pieces include Kodak's L. B. Jones on pictures and Cleveland Ad Club attention tests.
Why read it now
The debate is the useful part. Kennedy named the problem correctly: advertisers repeat each other's costly mistakes because results stay private. Balmer and the editorial named the obstacle correctly: firms will not hand over their numbers. Later history split the difference. The Audit Bureau of Circulations (1914) made some shared facts standard, and much of today's shared evidence comes from published cases, the IPA effectiveness databank, and sponsor-funded centres such as Ehrenberg-Bass, where firms share data under agreed rules. Balmer's plan to mine published advertising is close to what swipe files and ad libraries do now. Kennedy's own text is thin: an analogy, a complaint and a pledge, with no method for comparing results across products. The editorial's hint that the institute also served as publicity for his new agency is fair to weigh. Jones's rule that a picture must connect directly with the product still holds. Use: in a Gulf market with little public data, pool anonymised campaign results with non-competing peers under written rules instead of waiting for an institute.
Passages worth keeping
What the cyanide process has done for mining I believe the proposed institute would do for advertising.
كما أتاحت طريقة كيميائية استخراج ذهب كان يُرمى، يمكن لمعهد أبحاث أن يستخرج معرفة ضائعة في تجارب المعلنين.
In advertising there is to-day a lack of consistency in method, lack of harmony in opinion, lack of certainty in operation.
الإعلان في زمنه بلا منهج ثابت ولا رأي متفق عليه ولا يقين في النتائج.
He has to grope his way through experiments, fads, whims, stunts and schemes until he has paid the price of a complete education for a mere slice of knowledge.
المعلن الذي يتعلم وحده يدفع ثمن تعليم كامل مقابل قدر يسير من المعرفة، لأنه يجرب كل شيء بنفسه.
Advertisers would not give up their private records.
محاولة سابقة لجمع بيانات المعلنين فشلت لأن الشركات رفضت كشف أرقامها.
no illustration whatever is better than one that fails to connect directly with the article advertised.
إعلان بلا صورة أفضل من إعلان بصورة لا علاقة لها بالمنتج.
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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