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T the very start, I want to emphasize one fact which I hope you will burn into your minds, if you do not remember another word said tonight, and that is this:

There is no "mail-order method."

There is no one way-no cut-anddried plan-no formula-no slot-machine into which you may drop your advertising appropriation with one hand while you gather in the results with the other.

Advertising is not an Exact Science— not yet.

On the other hand, neither is it a gamble or a game of chance.

The laws of Cause and Effect govern advertising just as they govern the Uni

verse.

And the advertiser succeeds just so far as he is able to analyze his proposition and determine what cause will produce the effect he wants to produce.

In trite and homely phrase, “Every tub must stand upon its own bottom"every advertising proposition must be worked out on an individual basis.

Therefore, the most you can hope to accomplish in a class like this-or for that matter, in the actual every-day work of advertising-is to learn how to analyze a proposition and all the many conditions and circumstances surrounding it; and with that analysis as a basis, to formulate a campaign that gives promise of the greatest results.

This analysis corresponds somewhat to the diagnosis of a surgeon. If we are correct and accurate in our diagnosis and then are skilled in the use of our tools, we will not have many failures laid at our doors.

I cannot help thinking that the first step, the diagnosis-the analysis of the

proposition is the more important of the two.

A surgeon may be never so skilful with his knife, and yet if he does not determine what organ of your body is affected before he rolls up his sleeves and wades into you, you are very likely to die, no matter how beautiful the operation.

And your advertising man may be never so skilful with his pen, and yet if he does not know just what your business needs before he wades into your copy, your business is very likely to die, no matter how beautiful the advertising. Let us, then, consider for a little time

The Analysis of an Advertising Campaign To start at the beginning, advertising, no difference how it is done, no difference what method is employed—mailorder, local retail, general publicity, or what not-has for its primary object the separation of a portion of the public from its coin.

On the one hand is the Commodity, the article to be sold.

On the other is the possible Customer. Advertising of some kind must bring them together. It is self-evident that the means we will employ for bringing these two together must be determined upon the inherent nature of these two factors.

But when we come to decide what means we shall employ, we find we are confronted by still other limitations. For example, it costs money to advertise, and business men and business houses differ in their inherent natures as much as the customers differ. So we have to take other factors into consideration.

For myself, I have found it convenient to group all the various condi tions affecting the planning of an ad

vertising campaign under four heads, which we shall call the

Four Prime Factors of Advertising

First, the Commodity.

Second, the Customer.

Third, the Conditions.

Fourth, the Concern.

Each of these must be studied separately and in itself, but at the same time each must be studied in its relation to the other three factors. You cannot decide a single thing about your plan of campaign until you have considered carefully all four factors, and how they each affect the other.

Take, first, the Commodity, the

article to be advertised.

What do you want to know about it? Everything? Yes, everything-how it is made, what it is for, the price as compared with other articles of the same kind, all its strong points, certainly all its weak points-in short, every fact concerning the article that you can get from the manufacturer or the man who sells it, and best of all, from people who have bought it and used it.

But when you collect these facts you find that you have a large bunch of information that is "without form and void"-too much to use even if you have a whole Sunday supplement in which to exploit your proposition. Too muchnot on account of space limitations, but because, under ordinary circumstances, you cannot hope to hold the customer's attention for long.

You must concentrate.

You must select the most convincing facts.

Knowing what to eliminate-to omitis more important than knowing what to put in.

You are in the position of an attorney in an important case who has brought out a mass of testimony from a hundred witnesses. He cannot trust the jury to sift this testimony for itself, but he must eliminate and select and bring to bear upon the jury those facts which will

have the greatest weight in making his point and winning his cause.

But how are you to know what facts to select and what facts to eliminate? Only by studying the three other prime factors. They all affect your selection of facts.

The second factor is

The Possible Customer

Who is he? Where is he? What is his attitude toward an article of this kind? Does he have to be educated to its use. What will he first demand of it? Will he deem style or durability of greater importance? Is he looking for a better quality than he now gets, or is he most anxious about saving money? Is he in the habit of buying by mail? And so on through a list of a hundred questions.

The more nearly we can "size up" the average customer for this particular article-the more nearly we can analyze his habits of thought and habits of purse -the more likely we are to succeed in bringing to bear upon his mind the salient facts which will appeal to him with irresistible force.

And I'm sure I need not tell you that this is not an easy thing to do. In our great and glorious country we are not yet sharply divided into classes. They say that one of the richest men of America used to wear habitually a $10 suit of ready-made clothes. A coal heaver occasionally "blows himself" for an hundred dollar garment-but they are the exceptions. What we must do is to strike the average.

The third prime factor I have called

Conditions

by which I mean the state of trade, the state of competition and all external circumstances which are likely to affect the proposition.

A campaign which would succeed very well at one time would prove a failure at another.

Not only must general trade condi

tions be taken into consideration, but the activity of competitors, the special propositions that other houses are making must all be studied and considered to help us to decide what part of our campaign shall be aggressive and what part defensive.

It is, of course, not wise to become panic-stricken every time a competitor makes a move, but what he does either helps or retards your own progress, and is an important factor to reckon with.

As long as men have no monopoly, trade will be divided, and the advertiser who wants his share of trade must meet competition and trade conditions.

Just as a general must study the forces and movements of the enemy, just as he must take the weather, the season of the year and a score of other things into consideration in planning his campaign, so must the advertiser look beyond the absolute relation existing between his customer and his commodity.

Now with the Commodity analyzed, the Customer studied and Conditions determined, we are ready to say how we shall bring the Commodity and the Customer together.

But we still find that the means we will employ are subject to limitations which must be considered. I have summed them up under the general head,

The Concern

by which I mean the house, its resources and the personality, the individuality, the idiosyncrasies of the man or men who conduct the business.

By resources I do not mean merely the initial appropriation for advertising. We must consider more than that.

What has the house back of it?

How extensive a demand can it supply?

What is the margin of profit on each sale?

How long can the advertiser afford to wait for the "tide to turn" if things do not go right at the start?

All this is of vital importance in de

termining every move we make throughout the campaign. For example, it is possible for a campaign to be too successful-so successful that it swamps the factory with orders, necessitating running overtime at double pay and consequent loss all because the resources of the advertiser were not duly considered in planning the campaign.

But it is not enough to consider merely the material resources of the house. Its personality is of equal importance. This is the factor that is more frequently overlooked in planning a campaign, and yet I believe that it is of vast importance that the plan and the man fit.

We believe this so thoroughly that we have more than once changed a plan which was working well, simply because there was a change of managers.

The manner in which a man handles his correspondence; his breadth and liberality of mind; his inherent sense of justice and fairness, all have an important bearing on the plan.

We frequently handle two, three, and on occasions as high as a dozen accounts of advertisers in almost identically the same business. Sometimes the article is identical-the product of the same factory-and yet we devise very different plans for the two different men. So far as we are capable of studying the man, and analyzing his mind, we make the plan fit him.

For after all in advertising as in everything else, it is personality that

counts.

And personality counts upon paper just as surely as in personal contact.

The standing and reputation of the house, its previous condition, must be considered. Surely no one would think of offering a house like Tiffany's, for example, the same plan as would be devised for a State street instalment house-even if both houses were selling identical goods.

I believe book agents were once and doubtless yet are drilled in setspeeches which they all repeat parrot

like, but you hardly would send a man on the road thus equipped.

Neither is it safe to try to fit a ready-made business plan upon a man who has any individuality, personality or red-blood in his veins.

He wants his plan made to order.

* * *

And now having considered the four prime factors:

The Commodity,

The Customer,

The Conditions, and

The Concern,

we are ready for a selling plan, and that is of greater importance than copy or mediums.

Here is the article with its manifold advantages.

Here is the customer with his capacity for the article.

How, under existing conditions, is the house back of the proposition to bring the two together with the resources at its command with the greatest economy of time and money?

What plan can we devise which will make it easy for this particular house to persuade the public to buy this particular article?

What plan will make it easy for us to persuade the Customer to let go his coin with a cheerful heart?

If we discover that plan and have a good sharp pencil, the copy almost writes itself.

The first requisite of a selling plan is that it be such as will inspire

Confidence

You have recently heard a great deal about "Reason Why" copy-some one discovered at a late date that reasons are a good thing to give a man if you want to persuade or convince him; but unfortunately reasons are like statistics-you can prove almost anything with them-on paper, and unless the skeptical public knows you, it does not know that your reasons are any more true than your bald statements. So

with all our reasons-and you must give them in most cases-we want some means of inducing confidence.

This necessity has given rise to
The Money-Back Guaranty,
The 30 Days' Free Trial,

The No-Money in Advance plan,
The Bank Deposit plan,

and numerous modifications of them which tend to induce the customer to feel perfectly safe in ordering from an unknown house an article she has not

seen.

How far the advertiser must go to meet the customer and win his confidence depends upon the nature of the proposition as we have determined it by analysis of the four prime factors.

Copy

The selling plan decided upon, the copy is the next consideration-but it cannot be considered apart from the Circulation which we will give it.

By Copy, I mean not only your advertisements proper, but all the literature of what is called "the follow-up system," and by

Circulation I mean publications, letters, circulars, posters and whatever means we use to circulate, to promulgate our story.

What do we want to put into our copy?

How could we ever tell without a preliminary analysis such as that which we have just outlined?

In most mail order campaigns, the sale is made by the follow-up, the advertisement being merely the means of starting the inquiry.

Personally, when I have thoroughly mastered all the facts I can about my four prime factors and have formulated my selling plan, I sit down and imagine that I am speeding through the country on the 20th Century Limited. We stop at a little junction to change engine, and I go out upon the rear platform of the last car.