GETTING THE ADVERTISEMENT READ 1. Turning attention into interest.—Attention is the first in a series of mental processes which the suc cessful advertisement must induce in the reader. The advertisement which attracts the initial attention only and fails to gain interest has left work unfinished at the very start.
We continually follow in thought a succession of images that are associated with something in our own experience. Experiments prove that forced or vol untary attention cannot be sustained for more than a few seconds at a time. For this reason an adver tisement must suggest images that will hold the in terest by the association of other images in the reader's own mind.
In the series of images or mental pictures thus produced, there must be gradual,and certain progres sion from the first image to the one which causes the product advertised to be favopbly considered. The mind constantly selects certain impressions from memory, combines these with the mental pictures sug gested by the description, and thus produces the final image conveyed by the advertisement.
2. Connected images stimulate interest.—If an ad vertisement starts one on a train of images toward a desired result and then introduces irrelevant ideas, the interest will be killed. When statements are so dis connected that we can hold them in mind only by effort, we let them go while we attend to something else. Notice that in the foregoing advertisement, the suggestions are pleasant, they are closely connected and follow each other in logical order. The illustra tion is pertinent; the man at the plough directs the eye to Big Ben which stands out in almost life size. "Four a. m. in growing time, starts the farmer's day —brings a bumper crop of hours for chores and in the field." The train of images suggested by text and display lead the interest up to the climax in which conviction is secured—"Big Ben is six times factory tested." "Westelox folk build more than three million alarms a year—and build them well." Type, arrangement, illustration, headline which is specific and unique, all hold the interest to the very end. One reads it in
voluntarily.
The Prophylactic Tooth Brush advertisement sug gests connected imagery. The copy within the part that does the brushing contains only two ideas: "The shape fits your jaw—the bristles fit your teeth," while the slogan "A clean tooth never decays" is particu larly apt.
To create involuntary interest, an advertisement must present connected imagery and make one or two things prominent so that a definite conclusion may be formed. Otherwise there will be no stimulus to decision and action.
3. Appeal to the One of the chief purposes in adver tising is to evoke pleasing images in the mind of the reader.
Success in moving audiences depends upon the ability of the speaker to suggest only a part of the picture he desires his audience to see, but to do so in such a way as to cause them in imagination to repro duce the complete picture.
This is exactly what an advertise ment should do. If the reader's imagination is stimulated to follow out the line of images suggested, either by reason or thru the emo tions, the battle is more than half won. The •factors of reason and emotion will be treated more spe cifically in later chapters.
An illustration of appeal to the imagination is the Globe-Wernicke advertisement, on page 51, which features the sectional bookcase— "the heart of the home"--as the modern substitute for the minstrels, troubadours, jesters and tutors of earlier days. A heart-shaped illus tration of each of these has an inscription beside it. The pictures alone stimulate the imagination pleas antly, but the text makes them even more interesting and ties up with the purpose of the advertisement— to show that the Globe-Wernicke is "the center of the family's intellectual life, a hall of learning and a the ater of amusement." The text reads as follows: The Bards of Ancient Greece Homer, the greatest of these minstrel-historians, is preserved to us in the Globe-Wernicke Sectional Bookcases.