IV. Adaptation to Audience
The degree to which the simplification of language in an advertisement should be carried depends upon the audience addressed. It is evident that a larger and less educated portion of the public is included in the possible customers for breakfast food and chewing gum than there are in the portion who would be likely to purchase a set of books. An even smaller portion of the public would be interested in an automobile or a piece of automatic machinery. A good advertisement should be framed in language that will be understood by all possible purchasers of an article. Many household articles, such as bread, breakfast food, candy, and confections, are advertised in language that a fourth-grade child will readily understand.
V. Assignment III
Write an advertisement for an athletic contest in which your school will take part, addressing it to the students in your school.
Write an advertisement to introduce a new candy or confection among grammar-school children.
Write an advertisement for boys’ hats; for girls’ hats; for overalls; for a magazine devoted to automobiles; for a magazine devoted to fiction.
VI. Simplicity in Structure
An advertisement must be clear, not only in language and construction, but in mechanical structure as well. Attention-lines and command-lines must be short and set up so as to stand out clearly from the body of the advertisement. The eye takes in automatically from four to six words at a glance, setting the natural limit of length for strong features in an advertisement. Artistic arrangement helps an advertisement because carefully balanced matter is more attractive than inartistic combinations. A well-balanced advertisement, an advertisement in which the points are properly subordinated, conveys its meaning to the reader more easily than a badly distributed statement of the same arguments. In the last analysis good art is little more than good order, order that is pleasing to the eye as well as the mind. Good order requires a distribution of eye-effects that coincides with the distribution of mind effects.
VII. Assignment IV
Measure ten particularly attractive advertisements, illustrated or otherwise. Find the line on which the attention is focused and measure its distance from the top and bottom. Test these distances by the formulæ: