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But pictures in mail order advertising may form half the cost of selling. And you may be sure that everything about them has been decided by many comparative tests. Before you use useless pictures, merely to decorate or interest, look over some
mail order ads. Mark what their verdict is.
A man advertised an incubator to be sold by mail. Type ads with
right headlines brought excellent returns. But he conceived the idea
that a striking picture would increase those returns. So he increased his space 50 percent to add a row of chickens in silhouette. It did make a striking ad, but his cost per reply was increased by exactly that 50 percent. The new ad, costing one-half more for every insertion, brought not one added sale. The man learned that incubator buyers were practical people. They were looking for attractive offers, not for pictures.
Think of the countless untraced campaigns where a whim of that
kind costs half the advertising money without a penny in return. And
it may go on year after year. Mail order advertising tells a complete
story if the purpose is to make an immediate sale. You see no
limitations there are on amount of copy. The motto there is, "The
more you tell the more you sell." And it has never failed to prove out
so in any test we know.
Sometimes the advertiser uses small ads, sometimes large ads.
None are to small to tell a reasonable story. But an ad twice larger
brings twice the returns. A four times larger ad brings four times the returns, and usually some in addition. But this occurs only when the larger space is utilized as well as the small space. Set half-page copy in a page space and you double the cost in returns. We have seen manya test prove that.
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