Information

An ad-​​writer, to have a chance at suc­cess, must gain full infor­ma­tion on his sub­ject. The library of an ad agency should have books on every line that calls for research. A painstak­ing adver­tis­ing man will often read for weeks on some prob­lem which comes up. Per­haps in many vol­umes he will find few facts to use. But some one fact may be the key­stone of success.

This writer has just com­pleted an enor­mous amount of read­ing, med­ical and oth­er­wise, on cof­fee. This is to adver­tise a cof­fee with­out caf­feine. One sci­en­tific arti­cle out of a thou­sand perused gave the keynote for that cam­paign. It was the fact that caf­feine stim­u­la­tion comes two hours after drinking.

So the imme­di­ate brac­ing effects which peo­ple seek from cof­fee do not come from the caf­feine. Remov­ing caf­feine does not remove the kick. It does not mod­ify cof­fees delights, for caf­feine is taste­less and odorless.

Caf­feine­less cof­fee has been adver­tised for years. Peo­ple regarded it like near-​​beer. Only through weeks of read­ing did we find a way to put it in another light. To adver­tise a tooth paste this writer has also read many vol­umes of sci­en­tific mat­ter dry as dust. But in the mid­dle of one vol­ume he found the idea which has helped make mil­lions for that tooth paste maker. And has made this cam­paign one of the sen­sa­tions of advertising.

Genius is the art of tak­ing pains. The adver­tis­ing man who spares the mid­night oil will never get very far. Before adver­tis­ing a food prod­uct, 130 men were employed for weeks to inter­view all classes of con­sumers. On another line, let­ters were sent to 12,000 physi­cians. Ques­tion­naires are often mailed to tens of thou­sands of men and women to get the view­point of consumers.

A $25,000-a-year man, before adver­tis­ing out­fits for acety­lene gas, spent weeks in going from farm to farm. Another man did that on a trac­tor. Before adver­tis­ing a shav­ing cream, one thou­sand men were asked to state what they most desired in a shav­ing soap.

Called on to adver­tise pork and beans, a can­vass was made of some thou­sand of homes. There-​​to-​​fore all pork and bean adver­tis­ing has been based on “Buy my brand.” That can­vass showed that only 4 per­cent of the peo­ple used any canned pork and beans. Ninety-​​six per­cent baked their beans at home.

The prob­lem was not to sell a par­tic­u­lar brand. Any such attempt appealed to only four per­cent. The right appeal was to win the peo­ple away from home-​​baked beans. The adver­tis­ing, which with­out knowl­edge must have failed, proved a great success.

A can­vas made, not only of homes, but of deal­ers. Com­pe­ti­tion is mea­sured up. Every adver­tiser of a sim­i­lar prod­uct is writ­ten for his lit­er­a­ture and claims. Thus we start with exact infor­ma­tion on all that our rivals are doing. Clip­ping bureaus are patron­ized, so that every­thing printed on our sub­ject comes to the man who writes ads.

Every com­ment that comes from con­sumers or deal­ers goes to this man’s desk.

It is often nec­es­sary in a line to learn the total expen­di­ture. We must learn what a user spends a year, else we shall not know if users are worth the cost of get­ting. We must learn the total con­sump­tion, else we may overspend.

We must learn the per­cent­age of read­ers to whom our prod­uct appeals. We must often gather this data on classes. The per­cent­age may dif­fer on farms and in cities. The cost of adver­tis­ing largely depends on the per­cent­age of waste cir­cu­la­tion. Thus an adver­tis­ing cam­paign is usu­ally pre­ceded by a very large vol­ume of data. Even an exper­i­men­tal cam­paign, for effec­tive exper­i­ments cost a great deal of work and time.

Often chemists are employed to prove or dis­prove doubt­ful claims. An adver­tiser, in all good faith, makes an impres­sive asser­tion. If it is true, it will form a big fac­tor in adver­tis­ing. If untrue, it may prove a boomerang. And it may bar our ads from good medi­ums. It is remark­able how often a maker proves wrong on asser­tions he had made for years.

Impres­sive claims are made far more impres­sive by mak­ing them exact. So, many exper­i­ments are made to get the actual fig­ures. For instance, a cer­tain drink is known to have a large food value. That sim­ple asser­tion is not very con­vinc­ing. So we send the drink to the lab­o­ra­tory and find that its food value is 425 calo­ries per pint. One pint is equal to six eggs in calo­ries of nutri­ment. That claim makes a great impression.

In every line involv­ing sci­en­tific details a cen­sor is appointed. The ad-​​writer, how­ever well informed, may draw wrong infer­ences from facts. So an author­ity passes on every adver­tise­ment. The unin­formed would be stag­gered to know the amount of work involved in a sin­gle ad. Weeks of work sometimes.

The ad seems so sim­ple, and it must be sim­ple to appeal to sim­ple peo­ple. But back of that ad may lie reams of data, vol­umes of infor­ma­tion, months of research.

So this is no lazy man’s field.

About the Author

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