VI
Algunas lecciones que he aprendido en
publicidad
123
Richard A. Foley 124
Cómo lograr la
sinceridad
El lazo de la comercialización
La"urgencia" de la publicidad
La publicidad es un reflejo de
la vida
147
J. George Frederick 148
Análisis de los
medios de
comunicación
Y finalmente, Estrategia
IX
Axiomas de la publicidad
183
Kenneth M. Goode 184
goods; but you could sit and choose media until you were black in
the face, and never move a boy’s express wagon full of toy
balloons. Mechanical departments help copy find favorable
expression; but the most meticulously symmetrical piece of
typography that ever lulled a roving eye will never turn a nickel,
unless it eases home a message some real copy writer has cut and
hammered until it means something very vital to every man who
reads it.
Copy, in one form or other, is the heart and soul of advertising.
Except as an aid to the preparation of copy, or to the extension of
copy after it has been prepared, everything else is more or less
meaningless. Much of the unnecessary complication in modern
advertising thought is due to straying away from that one simple
fundamental. If copy is good enough, it can succeed without a
dollar spent on anything except white space to print it in; if copy is
bad enough, the most elaborate merchandising and marketing
plans will only pile up the possibilities of failure.
This blunt truth will, I fear, run athwart many able men whose
generous conceptions of “advertising” have grown to embrace
everything—from finding an architect for the factory to placing
fair-haired boys behind the merchant’s sales counters.
You may remember an old story of the man who proposed to
trade his cow for his neighbor’s bicycle: “I’d look fine, wouldn’t I,
trying to ride a cow?” was the ungracious answer. “Yes,” returned
the proposer, “but think how I would look trying to milk a
bicycle.”
Respectfully I commend this primitive form of reasoning to any
who feel I unduly overestimate the importance of copy. On a
pinch, you can easily imagine an advertising campaign—mail
order, for example—simplified down to nothing but copy. But try
to think of an advertising campaign without copy!
Kenneth M. Goode 185
195
F. R. Feland 196
ness every day for a normal span of life and never get out of the
first alcove.
There must be a discrimination; hence there must be a basis for
discrimination and I submit that we automatically only read those
things which minister to our self-preservation through our need
for—
Information
Beauty
Entertainment
you a lot of money. What are they getting now for a page in the
Saturday Evening Post?” He may even ask how much money it
will cost and express a hope that it will pay you, but he will never
turn bright, expectant eyes and inquire what it is you are going to
say in your copy. He will not for an instant think of your “going
out to buck Royal” or advise with you as to the lessons that may
be learned from what Ryzon did and did not do.
The only people who will be in the least interested in what your
copy is to be or in the media you are going to use will be
advertising agencies and men who have space to sell, and they will
be interested for reasons that touch precisely upon the definition of
interest given in foregoing paragraphs. I will repeat the statement
that the public is entirely indifferent to what any advertiser is
going to say next week, next month or next year.
Your attention device catches the reader’s eye. This device may
be size, shape, picture or what not; now you want him to read and
to continue reading.
You must work entirely from his needs, his likes or his dislikes.
There is no drama, there is no interest in advertising that does not
have its roots in the need of some person for something, or in the
fact that the person likes or dislikes a certain thing or certain ways
of doing things.
The simple retail store copy says—
and that is enough because they are addressing the woman who
needs shoes, who needs fashionable shoes, who likes gray suẻde
shoes she has seen, and whose foot may be large, small or
medium. It ignores the woman who hasn’t $8.00. They will get her
next week when they reduce them to $5.95.
F. R. Feland 203
There is news about your needs and all it has to do is to tell you
what it promises to tell you and so long as it is doing this a woman
with blankets to wash will read until her credulity is strained.
I noticed an advertisement today headed “A Smiling Baby.”
That headline was founded on one rule of human likes and dislikes
I referred to. We like smiling babies: we don’t like crying babies.
For that reason I call it good.
The next precept to remember is—People are not interested in a
one-sided pleading. They are willing to take sides; they are willing
to take your side if you raise an issue, but do not, in the guise of
argument, offer a contention against which there is no resistance.
… it raises an issue.
If it is possible to get news value into your story, do it. It is
possible more often than you think. The reporter writes as though
the thing were taking place as he wrote it. Have you noticed that?
Their headlines say:
Always the present tense. Use it wherever you can and, above
all, write the thing you write as though nothing of the sort had ever
been written before. Keep in your own mind the illusion that you
are saying the thing for the first time. That will almost add news
value to the statement that the Eastman Kodak Company makes
camera films.
Keep constantly in mind your reader’s needs, his likes and
dislikes. Write about these things or not, as the situation may
require, but never let any other point dominate your conception of
the thing you are writing about.
Think of your goods as things which the reader needs, I never
as something you want to sell.
Just here it will be helpful to consider that all merchandise from
a copy point of view comes into one of these classes: