Another pithy gem from Frank Irving Fletcher.
“Illumination through elimination is the task of compression.”
This was written by a man who penned over 50,000 ads that were less than 100 words, yet created breakthrough sales results for his retail clients. In two cases he kept the clients for 20 years. For one he placed an ad every 3 days in the NY Times for 20 straight years without repeating an ad (yes, I have these hundreds of ads in my swipe file if you had to ask).
Fletcher was adamant that if a man didn’t know how to use a small amount space, he couldn’t be trusted with a large amount of space. His feeling was that large space was a substitute for writing and advertising skill.
You can argue with that if you like, but; the man was paid $36,000 for campaigns in the middle of the depression. He knew how to make a small space pull large amounts of cash out of the market for his clients.
The reason for his emphasis on “compression” is he felt that by reducing the words, he could make the idea stand out even more powerfully. Words can get in the way of ideas.
Compression forces Clarity.
He would often re-write these little ads 40+ times till he found a way to articulate a motivating idea that made the cash register ring.
He said the account that taught him the most about advertising was the company mentioned above where he had to produce 3 small ads a week, every week, for 20 years. It taught him how to communicate the same idea, in different ways, in a very, very small space.
