II The Advertising Writer Who Is Bigger Than His Ad By George L. Dyer
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ASKED an attorney the other day why a certain New York lawyer was so uniformly successful. “I‟ll tell you,” he replied. “It‟s because he is always bigger than his case.”
Copy is a matter of extreme importance. It is so very important that it requires a broad man to prepare it. He should be “bigger than his case.” It is for this breadth of understanding and grasp of business conditions that I contend. An advertising writer should be bigger than his ad. Not, perhaps, to begin with; but he should not be content until he is master of it, till he can walk all around his proposition, go all over it and through it. To be a good advertising man is to be a good deal more than that term is popularly supposed to imply. However, it is not necessary to go to work in a shoe shop in order to handle shoe advertising successfully. There was a man who tried that once, and by the time he had learned the business he was as little fitted to advertise it as the head of the firm or the intelligent factory foreman. A sure way to lose receptivity and to kill initiative is to become saturated with the technicalities of the trade. The advertising man must think along broad lines. He must not lose his sense of the relation of his concern to
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