Planning Advertisements (RLE Advertising)

Gilbert Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136669651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

The purpose of every advertisement is to sell the thing which it advertises. Looking at the full range of the planning involved in the advertising business, Planning Advertisements first considers the initial stage, where the advertisement practitioner—advertiser relationship is paramount, before looking at the planning stages needed for all types of advertising, ranging from direct mail to hoardings.

First published in 1935.

PLANNING ADVERTISEMENTS

CHAPTER I

PLANNING AN APPROACH TO ADVERTISEMENTS

BY a happy event, a few days before the writing of this book could be put off no longer the London Press Exchange Ltd., published for private circulation a little volume wherein is a speech by William Haslam Mills on advertisement writing, the last he ever delivered. And so a few sentences may be printed from it, which may safely be done, for it is certain that no one at the “L.P.E.,” where I spent so many contented years, will disapprove. Thus I may begin not only with the assistance of Mills' beguiling phrases, but with the weight of his great authority, for no greater writer of advertisement copy ever lived than Mills. He came into copywriting from journalism, from the topmost rungs of journalism, from the Manchester Guardian, and the advertisements and the booklets that he wrote are the classics of commercial literature.

“The question arises,” he said, “whether there are any definite rules, or at any rate hints, which one person engaged in this work of copywriting might usefully give to another. I think there are! But before we try to find them, let me say that I know as well as anyone in this room that the first, middle, and last purpose of every advertisement is to sell the thing which it advertises. There is no doubt whatever about that. Write your advertisements to show off a literary style, and before you know where you are you will have no advertisements to write. Let us, therefore, begin by pushing literature out at the front-door. We are not literary men; we are salesmen. We have got that clearly in our minds. We have, as I said, pushed literature out at the front-door of our minds. If we run to the sitting-room window, we shall see literature slinking away down the street. And then a surprising thing ought to happen! I hope it is happening or will happen in the experience of all the copywriters here. The literary spirit which we saw disappearing down the street did not, after all, go to the railway-station and leave the neighbourhood altogether; it took a sharp turn to the left—it came round to the back-door of the house! It got in at the back-door and, before we know where we are, it is doing quite a lot—helping to clean up and cook the dinner, and I know not what else. I have put it thus in a metaphor, but it seems to me—as I examine it again—to tell us almost exactly what the literary spirit can do and ought to do in this work of writing advertisements to go into the Press.

“For behold what happens! I was just going to say in this advertisement that I was writing that so-and-so's tinned food was made ‘under ideal conditions.’ The literary spirit won't have that. The literary spirit points out that ideal conditions don't mean anything to anyone. Tell them, says the literary spirit, what the ideal conditions are. If you mean there are roses all round the factory door—say so. If you don't know, go and find out.”

Now I have borrowed thus from Mills' lecture because we were of the same mind on this subject, but had I attempted to state the case for considering advertisement writing in terms of literature, I might have provoked only bleak and ferocious antagonism on the part of the reader, whereas Mills' simple and harmonious sentences surely cannot be resisted.

The point is this: that there is frequent disagreement about the kind of advertisements the advertiser likes and the kind the advertisement practitioner wishes him to use. In days gone by, the writer of a book like the present one would have avoided mentioning this difficulty. He would have pretended that it did not exist. But that is not the modern spirit, which is, when a difficulty like this persistently occurs, to put it on the table for discussion; so let us have it out.

Well, I say that the writing of advertisements has some relation to literature. That is to say, it has some relation to art. More, I believe that the advertisement which, through ignorance or accident, has no relation to literature and no artistic ingredient in it, is poor and ineffectual salesmanship; but—and the qualification is of the highest importance—we must always bear in mind the words used by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: “So much depends on who speaks and to whom, in what mood and upon what occasion…. The business of writing demands two—the author and the reader….”

To exemplify this, I cannot do better than quote two short pieces of copy that appeared on the same day for two different advertisers in The Times:

“A WONDERFUL RANGE OF FUR MODELS

is now being displayed in Bradley's Salons, clearly marked in plain figures at lowest possible prices. Comparison in every respect is welcomed.

‘Bradley’ Furs are made under ideal conditions in their own workrooms at Chepstow Place, and all orders will help to maintain their hundreds of expert workers in constant employment. Each garment upholds Bradley's

reputation for

‘The Finest Value in

Finest Furs.’“

“REVILLON REMOVES A MISCONCEPTION

It is altogether wrong that so many otherwise well-informed women should regard ‘Revillon Frères’ as a name to be sighed in a despairing ecstasy of envy. There needs but a moment at 180, Regent Street to prove that here the modest purse is at its ease. Come and see!”

Now I maintain that the Revillon copy is out of sight better than Bradley's. The substance of both advertisements is really identical: they were both intended to emphasize the moderate prices at which furs were sold in those two shops. The difference is almost entirely one of manner, and surely the Revillon is not only the better manner but, considering the place and occasion, better manners. As salesmanship it is infinitely more effective, and it is more effective simply because it is more gracefully written. The literary spirit is here. In the Bradley copy the literary spirit is absent.

To illustrate the point further, let us take the simple subject of shirts. Is it not plain that if an advertisement is to be prepared announcing shirts to be retailed at 3s. 6d. each, it must be of a radically different character from an advertisement of shirts costing 15s., and different again from one describing shirts at 63s.? At every point those advertisements should differ one from another in the kind of illustration used, in the kind of argument, in the kind of words, in the very construction of the sentences.

All this has the appearance of irrelevance, but if the reader will be patient he will find that the thread of the argument has not been broken. For if advertisers would appreciate that such distinctions do exist, they would apprehend more clearly than they do that the kind of writing they like may not be the most effective kind to use.

My own views on this are going to be stated at length in the chapters that follow, but what is of interest at the moment is why those views need to be stated at all, and why at the outset the best that I can hope for is that the reader and I may be reconciled at the end! Why do the otherwise charming business men that I meet wish so often to employ one method and I another? Why does one of them, for instance, and his able associates, believe that a bull-dog wearing a Union Jack as waistcoat will induce our fellow-men to prefer his firm's hats before another's, while I believe that a more ingratiating approach would be to show them upon well-clothed men of enviable smartness? Clearly, there is a cleavage of opinion here which is going to take a deal of reconciling.

Well, let us, as I say, have it out, for this is no isolated personal experience, but is typical of many similarly embarrassing differences of opinion which advertisement practitioners everywhere are constantly meeting.

I believe I can put my finger upon one fact of general application which may go far to explain such divergences of view, and that is the unequal terms upon which the heads of great businesses meet the heads of advertising agencies. The advertiser is secure in his position as the chairman or managing director of a great undertaking, possibly one of international reputation. He is enthroned, with all around him the evidence of the wealth he has created or is administering. Great factories are, as it were, behind his chair. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of workpeople depend upon him for their livelihood. There comes before him one of the principals of the creative department of an advertising agency, and who is he? He has no such background. There is no standard by which the business man may judge him. The preparing of advertisement material cannot be likened to one of the learned professions. It is not one of the arts. It has no comparison with any of the sciences. A business man meets a doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant, knowing that there are governing bodies¹ within those professions which require a certain competence from their members before they may practise. There is this, and there is a tradition behind them.

The practitioner in the creative branch of advertising—I mean in the branch which prepares advertisement material—enjoys no such support. The work he and his colleagues do has few literary or artistic principles based on accumulated experience or continuous usage upon which they may rely, and—here is the point— what principles there may be are unknown to the business man. So he meets his client, this governing director I have described, secure in his panoply of power, and he meets him not as a professional man, not as a business man, not as a man even of artistic attainment, but as a “perhapser,” partly an artist and partly a business and partly a professional man, and with no tradition, no background, probably no reputation to sustain him—nothing but his native wit. And if he has, like myself, graduated to his position through the literary side of creative advertising, he may well be an unready talker, for as Hazlitt says, reading, study, silence, thought, are a bad introduction to loquacity.

If I may be forgiven for comparing him with myself, I go thus unarmed, unhonoured, and unsung into the room bearing under my arm the series of advertisements or what-not that I have to discuss. It is almost certain that five or six persons have contributed to the making of this material. Copywriters have written, and re-written, and polished. Illustrators have drawn and re-drawn. Typographers have designed and re-designed. Visualizers have experimented and rejected. And here am I, the bearer of this painstaking work, upon whom they are depending, and, as I say, who am I? I have spent eighteen years in the study of advertisement technique, in the writing, designing, illustration, and typography of all kinds of advertisement material. They have not been misspent years, I believe, and at least they have been diligent, and diligence has lifted me to a certain eminence among my fellow craftsmen so that within my own little world my name and work are known.

But what a little world it is, and how clearly one sees its proportions in this harsh air!

And can I tell this advertiser the manner of man he is meeting, and become expansive about my viewrs—for I have them—and the lifelong ideal I cherish for making advertisements more forcible, or more imaginative, or more charming according to time and occasion, but always more intelligent? Well, no; for he is impatient to look at the advertisements I have brought him, and he is anxious to see how he reacts to them. And there at the very outset we are at cross-purposes, for I must remind him that he is not a normal nor even a typical observer. If I and my associates have been honest with ourselves in their preparation, these advertisements were not intended for him at all, but for the persons who may eat or wear or use the commodity he sells, as a result of scanning them. They did not begin at the point where, if I do not mistake him, he would have begun with the question, “What do we want to say?” They begin, as nearly as can be contrived, at the point, “What does the public want to know, or what will induce a favourable opinion” of this commodity?

I will not enlarge upon the various devices which will have been used to make these advertisements interesting and convincing, my point here being merely that the business man and myself are not only on the opposite sides of the table physically before discussion of those advertisements begins: we are mentally separated, we do not start thinking from the same point, nor in the same way.

Wishing most earnestly to write as little egotistically as possible, the circumstances are that I bring to the consideration of these advertisements, eighteen years' specialized and unsparing study of every aspect of them, while my client, though he has spent twice that time in business, and is a thousand times my superior in commercial statesmanship, has not, unless he is exceptional, given more than a fragment of his time to such study. Yet I know that presently he may begin to “correct” in one minute what not only I but a team of experts have spent hours upon. But can I venture any such suggestion during the course of our discussions? I cannot, and hence this consideration seldom if ever occurs to him.

Thus it is that we think differently: he about his bull-dogs in their fancy vests, and I in what seems to him an unnecessarily highfalutin fashion. And what are the results? There are three. To dismiss the more important first, the first result is that a good deal of advertisement material is woefully wasteful and inefficient, because it disregards the finer and subtler and more ingratiating methods which could be used. It is behind the times. And it is so because the condition just described gives rise to the second: a vast deal of advertisement material has to be deliberately prepared with a view to its easy passage through the advertiser's office. The third result I will discuss in a moment, but let me pause here for a few moments to examine what has just been so frankly stated. Set down in print it appears the height of unreason, but it is not so. Lest I should appear to write in a complaining spirit (and nothing is further from my intentions), I will remind the reader that I have already drawn his attention to the lack of tradition from which the business called advertising suffers, and I will add to what has already been said.

Advertising men are themselves to blame for this condition. Advertising is compared by them to the older professions with a levity and a reckless disregard of proportion which is lamentable. It has been trumpeted from platforms as an exact science by its leaders, who have not even paused to reflect that the very words they have used are in contradiction. It has been likened to the law. It has been labelled an art and a game. It has been spoken of as though it were magic. It has been advanced as a panacea for any business ill. “It pays to advertise” is only one of scores of discredited and ridiculous catchwords. And all this has taken place in the grandest blaze of publicity that we ourselves can contrive. How can we expect business men to respect us? We have proclaimed ourselves to be lacking in sensitiveness, in perspective, in judgment. In short, we have failed so far to impress the commercial community, and we are just beginning to realize how foolish we have been—and not over-many of us either.

Let me have done with this irritable outburst and return to the third result of the condition that was engaging us a moment ago. It is this: that when the advertisements in question are finally laid before the advertiser there will most likely fall from his lips the observation, “I like” or “I don't like” this advertisement, and he will forthwith plunge into a discussion of a particular word in a sentence or the drawing of a face or the size of type used for a headline, forgetful, I am bound to say it, of the effectiveness of the whole.

Lest I appear unreasonable in deprecating this, may I suggest that if the same manufacturer were examining, say, the plans of a factory production engineer for re-routing a factory, he would surely not like or dislike anything, but would approve or disapprove?

Now may I be allowed to put forward some reasons why an advertisement should be approved rather than liked—meaning by “approved” an all-embracing, a tolerant, a broad acceptance of method and execution?

This attitude of mind has this first to recommend it, that it establishes the discussion upon a plane that is more likely to be intelligible to both parties to it. It puts factual accuracy within the realm of the advertiser and leaves the expression of facts to the specialist, where it properly belongs; for is it not his faculty for expression which gives rise to his employment?

Secondly, if the procedure I suggest is followed, the purpose of the advertisement may be more readily kept in view.

Thirdly, a discussion upon such a plane prevents opinions assuming the proportions of principles. The aptness of a word, the turning of a phrase, the likeableness of a face, the size or style of a line of type are and must ever remain matters of opinion, and the moment opinions clash all is dust and ashes. From the very nature of the relationship between the advertiser and his agent, if we begin to differ upon matters of opinion he does not argue with me; he tells me. There is no Caesar to whom we may appeal. He may maintain that the style of typography proposed, or the manner of the designer who drew the illustration, or the very features o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Chapter I Planning an Approach to Advertisements
• Chapter II Distributing the Advertiser's Merchandise and the Advertiser's Message
• Chapter III Planning the Advertiser's Message—I
• Chapter IV Planning the Advertiser's Message—II
• Chapter V Twenty Ways of Planning Advertisements
• Chapter VI Planning Advertisement Design
• Chapter VII Planning a Form Letter
• Chapter VIII Using the Hoardings
• Chapter IX Planning a Poster
• Chapter X Planning Advertising to the Retail Trade
• Chapter XI Planning Advertisement Films and Broadcasting
• Chapter XII The Advertiser in Search of an Agent