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"A class of advertisers try to reach their goal
by indirection. They assume that any subject is of
more interest than the facts about the goods they
have to sell.
"For instance, a man wishes to advertise shoes.
He prints a little romance telling how the heroine
wins a husband by the grace of her advertised
footwear. Then they go to live with the old folks
and save enough money on the family shoes to pay
off the mortgage on the farm.
"To a man in need of a new derby or the woman who
wishes to buy gloves nothing is of such vital
moment as the printed facts about the required
article. The most interesting news in the world is
news of the things we desire to buy. It affects us
personally. It reaches our vanity, our taste, our
sense of luxury, our desire for happiness, and it
touches our pocketbook.
"Tell the story of your goods believing that
it is the most interesting thing in the world.
Then perhaps you can make it so.
"Don't try to sneak the facts about your business
into the public consciousness by a surreptitious
hypodermic injection. Come out with them face to
face. Tell the people what you've got, why you can
serve them, what it costs and ask for their trade.
Advertising is news."
- George L. Dyer in Lesson 2, "THE
ADVERTISING WRITER WHO IS
BIGGER THAN HIS AD"
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"One day I was sitting there in my office, and
someone came in and said, 'There is a
quarter-page vacant in our magazine and you can
have it at a low rate to advertise your books if
you will get copy to us right away.'
I leafed the books through and came to a picture
of Marie Antoinette. I wrote something like this:
"This is Marie
Antoinette riding to her death.
Have you ever read her
tragic story?
In all literature there
are only a few great tragedies, great poems
and great essays, biographies...
If you know those, you
are well read, and if you don't know them, you
are not."
Eight Times As Many Coupons From Humanized Copy
It was short and simple. But this is the
interesting fact. Marie riding to her death on
that quarter of a page pulled eight times as many
coupons as we had ever got from one of these fine,
full pages on the glory and splendor of owning
fine books.
It was my first vivid lesson that a little touch
of human interest, a little of the common tragedy
or hope or love or success or affection that runs
through all our lives will out-pull what may be
technically a very much better advertisement, but
which lacks that human touch..."
-Bruce Barton in Lesson 3, "HUMAN APPEALS
IN COPY"
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"I have predicated all my own work on the basic
truth that people are susceptible to suggestion.
We live, move and have our being in a swirl of
suggestion, from morning till night, and from the
age of reason to the edge of the grave.
One suggestion accepted by one person becomes his
or her personal opinion.
This personal opinion, accepted by a group of
people, becomes the thing known as public opinion.
A favorable public opinion concerning a man or a
manufactured product becomes the thing known as
reputation.
Good reputation, in turn, is a thing that sells
goods.
I maintain that it is no more difficult to convey
a suggestion to a multiplicity of minds than it is
to one mind. If that much is granted, or if I can
prove that it has been accomplished, we have
established a very simple premise which carries in
its train very astonishing results. If it is true
that by printed propaganda, a favorable and
friendly opinion can be generated in a
multiplicity of minds, then it is equally true
that we have found a hothouse in which a good
reputation can be generated, as it were,
overnight.
In other words, the thing for which men in the
past have been willing to slave and toil for a
lifetime, they can now set out to achieve with
semi-scientific accuracy and assurance of success,
in periods of months instead of years.
The Real Copy Problem
The most difficult of all requirements is a
simplicity and artlessness of expression which
will render it reasonably certain that the
suggestion, when received, will be accepted
without resistance or resentment."
- Theodore F. MacManus in lesson 4, "THE
UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES OF GOOD COPY"
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"One does not sell an upholstered chair but
really the depression made by the body as you
settle into the chair. It is the effect, not the
medium, we are selling ...you do not sell a man
the tea, but the magic spell which is brewed
nowhere else but in a tea-pot.
What do you buy when you go to an antique dealer
and acquire a decrepit old chair? Not the
sensation of comfort which you secure with the
upholstered chair, but an even less material,
element - that of tradition, of bygone association
and historical legend.
Personally, I have found the appeals to
sentiment, ambition, a sense of luxury, more
compelling than reams of logic and pointed
argument."
- James Wallen in Lesson 5, "EMOTION AND
STYLE IN ADVERTISING COPY"
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"...right here I should like to nail one glaring
misconception and that is, 'advertising is
salesmanship in print'.
To be sure, the object of advertising is to sell
goods, but it cannot replace the salesmanship
which must take place in the shop or in the
meeting of the salesman with the jobber or the
retailer.
It is not salesmanship in this sense, at all. It
is more education, enlightenment and-above all
things-suggestion.
The chief reason that advertising cannot be
"salesmanship in print" is that a salesman or a
retailer can sense quickly the unresponsiveness or
prejudices of a potential customer. He can answer
questions, avoid issues or close them. He can be
extremely specific. As an advertisement must be
all things to all men, it must be suggestional
rather than argumentative, more often than not. It
cannot attempt to answer questions, because it
would become interminably involved.
The 'salesmanship in print' kind of advertising
pretty often is the sort that will pass muster
among an advertiser's employees who are invited to
judge of its merits. Written with an eye to the
home office viewpoint, this sort of copy usually
gets by a jury, but the fact remains, none the
less, that the real jury in the case is the consumer."
- Richard Foley in Lesson 6, "SOME
LESSONS I HAVE LEARNED IN
ADVERTISING"
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