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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 mans 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 mans field.
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