History of Advertising and Marketing 04: John F. Kennedy: Paper Salesmanship

Who did Lasker meet?

Lasker met John F. Kennedy.

In 1904, Kennedy told Lasker that advertising is not news, news is just a way of expressing advertising, and the ultimate meaning of advertising is "paper salesmanship."

These few words profoundly changed the advertising industry. It has awakened the sages of the industry: advertising is not just a high-pitched competition to publish corporate slogans in the media. What is important is to incorporate sales techniques into it, and ultimately promote users' purchasing behavior.

This may be a bit hollow, but fortunately, Kennedy used a super case to convince Lasker.

This super case is a 1900 washing machine. Its original advertisement showed a woman being handcuffed to a washtub with chains, and the title was "Don't handcuff yourself to the washtub."

The text of this ad is:

How? So, this ad looks pretty good at first glance. According to the average marketer's point of view: the title and picture of this advertisement are creative and eye-catching, use exaggeration to point out the benefits, introduce the product features, and finally include promotional methods. It is really a perfect advertisement!

But John F. Kennedy said: "If you want to sell something, this advertisement is useless."

He had five reasons: First, no woman would think that she They were handcuffed to the washtub; secondly, they did not want to be looked down upon like this; in addition, there was no mention of what the product could do; fourthly, people did not like to buy products with obvious features on installment payment, which would be ignored by everyone. Made fun of by the arriving guests; in the end, not newsworthy at all.

Rusker immediately took Kennedy to see the owner of 1900 Washing Machine Company. They originally planned to stop advertising after paying the original $15,000 a year. After hearing what Kennedy said, they agreed to let him write a series of ads. It took Kennedy four months to fully demonstrate the power of advertising.

Kennedy believes that "we cannot let a group of gray-haired chairman of the board guess the choices of housewives." After careful research, he made a new advertisement. Below is Kennedy's finished ad.

He removed the image of a woman handcuffed to a washtub. It turned into sitting in a rocking chair, reading a book, and turning the handle of the washing machine. The title is: "Let this washing machine pay off its debts."

Offensive ideas rarely win over readers or change people's minds. No one wants to hear words of blame; they want to hear words of praise. People always want to hear things that make them happy. Therefore, the new pictures and titles are an effective positive psychological suggestion for women. Titles like this are also very attractive to men.

In the book "Lasker's Advertising Journey", the main content of the advertisement's text is also recorded, as follows:

This paragraph is written in the first person, just like the wonderful The beginning of a novel always puts people into a state quickly. At the same time, it sticks to the title and invites people to read it intermittently with curiosity. Please appreciate the subtlety later. It makes women realize that whatever they give is valuable.

Moreover, in the end, the advertisement did not directly mention the price of the product, nor did it directly say the words "free trial". It only said to consumers "the cost is mine." Let's see if the 1900 washing machine can help. You do something. This is where the brilliance lies. The only goal of this ad is to entice people to give it a try for mutual benefit, and it's clearly very attractive in a real sense.

General promotional advertisements will beg: "Buy my product, don't buy other people's." This kind of selfish behavior will naturally be psychologically resisted by most people. And Kennedy stands completely on the customer's side, sharing their hard work, saving their expenses, and eliminating their concerns about quality. In this way, the benefits they get to the merchants are invisible.

This advertisement was a masterpiece at the time. During these four months, 1900 Washing Machine Company spent US$30,000 of its revenue on advertising each month. The cost per feedback received went from $20 to $4 and then dropped to an average of just a few cents per feedback. Eight months later, their factory had tripled in size.

For about three years after that, Lasker was busy with the business of this enterprise. When he later quit, the ads were changed and business went back to the way it was before.

This project made him understand that you cannot always support those who are unable to stand up on their own. Lasker later believed that sales pitches had been led astray into wanting advertising agencies to participate in and run other people's businesses, so he later became adamantly opposed to providing clients with additional services that had nothing to do with advertising. (Of course, this is based on his deep understanding of the limitations of advertising, which will be skipped here. We will discuss it in depth in the second half of this book when we talk about the limitations of advertising and additional services.)

Kennedy It was also emphasized that the copywriting formed after research still needs to be experimented. He gave the example of a star who acted in 5 plays, 3 of which were very good and the other 2 failed. He is still a star. Because if it were you, you would screw up all five of these plays. Stars have all the skills to perform these plays, but one thing they lack is the inability to determine with any certainty what the outcome will be. There are uncertainties in any transaction, so ads should be tested before use. Distribute advertising test samples, collect all results, and record them for analysis (please note, isn’t this the popular Internet advertising thinking today? The computer counts the click-through rate and forwarding rate of each advertisement or content, and then optimizes the advertising Open. It can be said that the world is always changing and history is always repeating).

In 1905, Kennedy wrote some of his experiments into a short book called "Experiments in Advertising." Lasker later recalled: "In my early days, I was right, advertising is news. The headline must be news that grabs people's attention. But that's all I knew. I didn't know that the text should be on paper. Kennedy taught me the art of selling.”

With Kennedy’s support, Lasker proudly said: “Our opinions are definitely worth all the commissions paid to us by our clients.”

After Lasker saw the power of advertising, he removed some file racks and created an independent copywriting department. Continuously recruit and train advertising copywriters. Among them, the most important thing is:

Recruited the following outstanding person.