Of course there were very great individual differences. It is evident
that a person who would have remembered all the sixty-four
advertisements on this basis of calculation would have made 128
points. The maximum which was actually made was in the case of two
women, each of whom reached 50 points. One man reached 49. The lowest
limit was touched in the exceptional case of one woman who made only
11 points. The average was 28.4. These figures seem small, considering
that less than a fourth were kept in mind, and even by the best memory
less than a half, but it must be considered that in the modern style
of advertisement the memory is burdened with many side features of the
announcement, and that the result is therefore smaller than if name
and article had been memorized in an isolated form. But these figures
have no relation to our real problem. We wanted to compare the memory
fate of the advertisements on the one kind of pages with that of the
parallel advertisements on the other kind. As soon as we separate the
two kinds of reproduced material we find as total result that the
forty-seven persons summed up 570 points for the advertisements on
pages with comic pictures, but 771 for the advertisements on pages
which contained nothing else. The average individual thus remembered
about six whole advertisements out of the thirty-two on the combined
pages, and about eight and a fifth of the thirty-two on the straight
pages. Among the forty-seven persons, there were thirty-six who
remembered the straight-page notices distinctly better than the
mixed-page advertisements, and only eleven of the forty-seven showed a
slight advantage in favour of the mixed pages. In the case of the men
this difference is distinctly greater than in the case of the women.
Only two of the fifteen men who participated showed better reproducing
power for the mixed material, while nine of the thirty-two women
favoured it. As the advertiser is not interested in the chance
variations and exceptional cases among the reading public, but
naturally must rely on the averages, the results show clearly that the
propaganda made on pages which do not contain anything but
advertisements has more than a third greater chances, as the relation
was that of 6 to 8.2.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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