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Ads back then had so much copy. What’s with that? Was it easy to command attention for that long because there wasn’t much else to do? No smart phone in the wai

Ads back then had so much copy. What’s with that? Was it easy to command attention for that long because there wasn’t much else to do? No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?

vel0city 2y ago
I see magazines with multi-page ads which read exactly like articles but have additional labeling that they're explicitly ads written by the company instead of ads written by the writers of the magazine. Often with slightly different styling. This example magazine has a number of single page ads with a good bit of copy in them. I'm trying to find an example magazine with those multi-page ads at the moment though. https://flickread.com/edition/html/676148065c1ba#1 https://flickread.com/edition/html/676148065c1ba#1
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  I think those style of ads are called advertorials, so that might help you find them. Internet Archive has lots of magazine scans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial
pier25 2y ago
No website to check the details of a product either
jdietrich 2y ago
The people who are actually interested in your product will generally want lots of information. Prior to the internet, how did they actually get that information? Overwhelmingly, through print advertising. If people who have no interest in your product see the headline and turn the page before getting to the body copy, that's no real loss; if people who are interested in your product have questions that aren't answered by the copy, that is potentially a very real loss.
- f33d5173 2y ago
  Usually the copy is entirely devoid of "information" per se. It's a series of nice sounding but totally vacuous statements.
warner25 2y ago
I suspect that there was little data to analyze how much attention the ads were commanding back then. I often think about how so many things now have been optimized (mostly for profit) to the extreme by data-driven processes, with big corporate marketing certainly being one of them. Up until two or three decades ago, I suspect that it was all based on tradition and the "gut feel" of out-of-touch and arrogant executives talking to each other over drinks (thinking of scenes from Mad Men here).
- sethammons 2y ago
  I took my marketing classes for my business degree in the early 2000s. Digital marketing was not addressed. The advice at the time was to get to six "impressions," six encounters with your brand before most people would start to recognize the brand. And it was very much admitted that you don't get to measure this and you must correlate sales trends with marketing trends. Very much "gut feel" in comparison of digital tracking. I'm still not convinced the tracking makes that big of a difference but obviously the market disagrees with me.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Digital tracking can be helpful as a proxy, but what matters - and what big brands still measure - is how marketing correlates to sales. Statistics can figure out a lot of this, though the data is noisy.
B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
> No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with? Yes. Sometimes it was a deliberate tactic - mostly adverts would go for the 'just an evocative picture', but a few would go the 'wall of text' route. My memory pops up the name Alan Sugar for an example of those - really dense walls ...
carlosjobim 2y ago
People with self respect will find it insulting if an advertisement doesn't try to convince them with copy. In the past, advertisers wanted to be careful to not insult their prospective clients. Modern ads usually have an undertone of "we despise you" towards their prospective clients. I guess they figured out that it's better spent dollars to try to reach people without self respect.
datavirtue 2y ago
There would have been a stack of these magazines in every home and each page would have been picked over several times. When I was a child magazines were still very popular and I would not rest until every last millimeter of each one was examined in detail multiple times.

Ads back then had so much copy. What’s with that? Was it easy to command attention for that long because there wasn’t much else to do? No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?

vel0city 2y ago

I see magazines with multi-page ads which read exactly like articles but have additional labeling that they're explicitly ads written by the company instead of ads written by the writers of the magazine. Often with slightly different styling. This example magazine has a number of single page ads with a good bit of copy in them. I'm trying to find an example magazine with those multi-page ads at the moment though. https://flickread.com/edition/html/676148065c1ba#1 https://flickread.com/edition/html/676148065c1ba#1

aspenmayer 2y ago
I think those style of ads are called advertorials, so that might help you find them. Internet Archive has lots of magazine scans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial

pier25 2y ago

No website to check the details of a product either

jdietrich 2y ago

The people who are actually interested in your product will generally want lots of information. Prior to the internet, how did they actually get that information? Overwhelmingly, through print advertising. If people who have no interest in your product see the headline and turn the page before getting to the body copy, that's no real loss; if people who are interested in your product have questions that aren't answered by the copy, that is potentially a very real loss.

f33d5173 2y ago
Usually the copy is entirely devoid of "information" per se. It's a series of nice sounding but totally vacuous statements.

warner25 2y ago

I suspect that there was little data to analyze how much attention the ads were commanding back then. I often think about how so many things now have been optimized (mostly for profit) to the extreme by data-driven processes, with big corporate marketing certainly being one of them. Up until two or three decades ago, I suspect that it was all based on tradition and the "gut feel" of out-of-touch and arrogant executives talking to each other over drinks (thinking of scenes from Mad Men here).

sethammons 2y ago
I took my marketing classes for my business degree in the early 2000s. Digital marketing was not addressed. The advice at the time was to get to six "impressions," six encounters with your brand before most people would start to recognize the brand. And it was very much admitted that you don't get to measure this and you must correlate sales trends with marketing trends. Very much "gut feel" in comparison of digital tracking. I'm still not convinced the tracking makes that big of a difference but obviously the market disagrees with me.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Digital tracking can be helpful as a proxy, but what matters - and what big brands still measure - is how marketing correlates to sales. Statistics can figure out a lot of this, though the data is noisy.

B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago

> No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with? Yes. Sometimes it was a deliberate tactic - mostly adverts would go for the 'just an evocative picture', but a few would go the 'wall of text' route. My memory pops up the name Alan Sugar for an example of those - really dense walls ...

carlosjobim 2y ago

People with self respect will find it insulting if an advertisement doesn't try to convince them with copy. In the past, advertisers wanted to be careful to not insult their prospective clients. Modern ads usually have an undertone of "we despise you" towards their prospective clients. I guess they figured out that it's better spent dollars to try to reach people without self respect.

datavirtue 2y ago

There would have been a stack of these magazines in every home and each page would have been picked over several times. When I was a child magazines were still very popular and I would not rest until every last millimeter of each one was examined in detail multiple times.