Chapter 20 Avoid Words That Wrinkle The Other Person‟s Brow There is one big lesson to be learned from the Roosevelt-Landon campaign. The days of the “Perils of Pauline” are over. Don‟t spoil a sale with butterfingers. MOVIE PRODUCERS are changing their ideas of the average mentality of audiences. It used to be about twelve years, but now it is going upward. This means that the hokum of yesterday is no more, that the days of the “Perils of Pauline” are over, and that the hero fighting the Indian on the edge of the cliff gets laughs instead of gasps. The fact that the American mind is growing up is not realized, unfortunately, by all copywriters, advertising people, radio people, and others who are trying to win the public to their way of thinking. The old-fashioned preacher could frighten people into going to church on Sunday with his “Hell and brimstone.” Today this doesn‟t succeed, as any preacher will tell you. People like a good show. They like to hear Al Smith speak on the radio, but they only laugh when a politician talks about the country “going to the dogs.” The old “dinner-pail” appeals have gone with the wind.
Many a young child tells his mother today, “You can‟t scare me – there‟s no such thing as a bogeyman.” And people don‟t believe in Santa Claus anymore.
Little boys used to be frightened by policemen. Not today. Intelligence is banishing fears.
People are laughing today at many advertising appeals. The old medicine man has been reborn in the pages of the American press. The clever manufacturer, however, is the one who has an advertising agency that is subtle in its appeal and has the image of the medicine man buried deep behind sound logic and sensible reasoning. Don‟t get me wrong: People today still buy from emotional urges, but the emotional darts that stir their instincts into action today must be “telegraphic” – not the “wooden arrows” of the Indian.
We are in a day of the “magic eye,” of television, of electrical impulses flashing back and forth invisibly. So must sales language fly – invisibly!
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