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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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