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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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