My contracts with the advertisers required them to pay me one-time rates, and my contracts with the publishers permitted me to send in copy at long-time rates, and the profit was about 45 per cent. And inasmuch as I always sent cash with the order, my copy was in great demand. Indeed, my agency was fairly inundated day after day with blank contracts from newspapers all over the country, the managers of which were clamoring for the Goldfield business. In addition to the Mims-Sutro account, I soon had many others; in fact, I had all the others. Within six months after my arrival in Goldfield my agency netted me $65,000.
SOME ADVERTISING THAT PAID
My second best customer was January Jones, the noted Welsh miner, and later, when the corporation of Patrick, Elliott & Camp swung into business as promoter, I placed its advertising. I held it, too, until the death of C. H. Eliott, when the control of that firm fell into other hands and it ultimately went out of business. In the course of three years my advertising agency inserted in the neighborhood of $1,000,000 worth of advertising in the newspapers of the United States, chiefly those of the big cities, and all of the advertising made money. It simply had to make money, because the brokers who did the advertising had little or nothing to begin operations with except the mines, and the mines were not their property.
The most remarkable feature of that advertising campaign to me was that I had never been a stock-broker, had never been a mine-promoter, and had never been in a mining camp before; but still, despite my utter lack of knowledge, to begin with, of the technical end of the business, my advertisements pulled in the dollars.
I was an enthusiast. I believed in the merits of the camp, and my enthusiasm undoubtedly carried itself to the readers of my advertisements. But the quality of the advertising copy did not entirely explain my success in bringing the money into Goldfield. The stock offerings undoubtedly struck a popular chord. Tens of thousands of people who for years had been imbibing the daily financial chronicles of the newspapers, but whose incomes were not sufficient to permit them to indulge in stock-market speculation in rails and industrials, found in cheap mining stocks the thing they were looking for—an opportunity for those with limited capital to give full play to their gambling, or speculative, instinct.
Time and again promotions were almost completely subscribed by telegraph in advance of mail responses reaching Goldfield; and it frequently needed but the publication of a half-page advertisement in 40 or 50 big city newspapers, of a Sunday, to bring to Goldfield by wire before Monday night sufficient reservations to guarantee oversubscription in a few days.
It was easy to give full play to my penchant for experimenting, in the evolution of mining-stock promotion in Goldfield. The old system, and the one which recently has enjoyed much vogue among financial advertisers, was the endeavor first to get names of investors rather than immediate results from the advertisements, and to follow them up by correspondence. In spending the first $1,000 appropriated for advertising from Goldfield, I split the money between two newspapers on one day. I constructed large display advertisements and appealed for direct, quick replies. This succeeded.
BUILDING GOLD MINES WITH PUBLICITY
A little later I organized a news bureau as an adjunct of the advertising agency.
It is acknowledged that this news bureau accomplished much for Nevada. As a matter of fact, it is generally conceded by Goldfield pioneers and by mining-stock brokers throughout the country that the news bureau was directly responsible for bringing into the State of Nevada tens of millions of dollars for investment, and was indirectly responsible for the opening up of the Mohawk and other great gold mines of the Goldfield camp and of the State.