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July 1949 Radio & TV News
 [Table of Contents]
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early
electronics. See articles from
Radio & Television News, published 1919-1959. All copyrights hereby
acknowledged.
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Return on investment for advertising
is always a prime consideration for companies, regardless of how wide the perspective
audience or the size of the competition. Luck plays some part in whether a certain
advertising campaign is successful, but as Mac points out in the July 1949 edition
of Radio & Television News magazine, there is great advantage to measuring
the effectiveness of each strategy. Advertising has never been cheap, especially
in venues with a large contingent of followers. In the Internet age, one of the
more popular schemes is 3rd-party pay-per-click ads that are served by a central
distributor (like Google and Bing) based on intelligent algorithms designed by teams
of business and marketing experts. Based on my conversations with some RF Cafe advertisers
who have tried Google's AdWords
program, most are not happy with the results because they experience a low ratio
of clicks-to-sales. Those who report success are people who have expended a lot
of effort learning how the system works and how to exploit it - often after learning
the hard way what the wrong way is. Unlike his fellow radio service and sales shops
operators in the story, it is doubtful many businesses would be willing to share
their hard-earned secrets with competitors. Too many books and articles offering
tips - as with those for job seeking advice or investment strategies - are typically
written by theoreticians who have never actually run a business and/or an advertising
campaign.
Mac's Radio Service Shop: Advertising for Dessert
By John T. Frye
 It was well after one-thirty when Mac, just
back from his lunch period, strolled into the service department of his radio shop.
He ran straight into an accusing look from Barney, his apprentice, who stood at
the service bench pointedly tapping his foot and glancing at his wrist watch.
"Boy!" Mac exclaimed, blandly ignoring this act and mopping his face with a handkerchief,
"it's hotter out in that sun than a ballast tube's shell!"
"You can talk plainer than that, and don't try to evade the subject," Barney
said sternly. "Where have you been loafing?"
"Say, Red," Mac said, ignoring the question completely and speculatively eyeing
the boy's glowing thatch, "would you mind wearing some kind of a cover, say a snood,
over that hair of yours these hot days? Every time I look at it, I feel just as
though I were sitting in front of an open fire.
"Oh, all right!" he suddenly broke down with a chuckle. "If you won't dock me
this time, I'll tell all. The first and third Tuesday in every month, a gang of
us radio service technicians have an informal little get-together over at The Dutchman's
during our lunch hour. Every guy buys his own dinner; but after lunch, while we
are messing around with the dessert, we talk about some phase of the service game.
Each meeting we try to talk about a different subject. Today we had cherry pie a
la mode and advertising."
"Who started all this?" Barney asked suspiciously.
"Well, I guess I did; and I'm glad," Mac replied. "It's working out even better
than I hoped. It is funny how that so-and-so down the street, who was a chiseling,
price-cutting, cold-solder-joint radio butcher before you met him, can turn out
to be a pretty good sort when you look at him over a bowl of chili or a big plate
of spaghetti-and-meatballs. It's strange, too, how you find out that he is getting
gray hairs wrestling with the same problems you have, and how just talking things
over with him seems to shrink those problems down to size. We are picking up new
members every meeting day, and I should not be surprised if this thing grew into
some kind of a service technicians' organization one of these days."
"Did you get any new ideas on advertising along with that cherry pie?"
"Lots of 'em," Mac admitted promptly.
"For instance?" Barney prodded, "For one thing, we decided that the old saw about
word-of-mouth advertising's being the very best kind for a radio service business
needed considerable qualification. That sort of publicity has a lot of variables
over which the service technician has no control. Its worth depends on how gabby
your customers are, how many friends they have, and so on. In a large city, where
very little neighboring goes on, the effectiveness of this kind of advertising is
considerably less than in a smaller community where the people do more talking to
each other.
"Now do not get the idea that we are opposed to doing good work and behaving
courteously so that our customers will recommend us to other people. Far from it!
What we decided was that it was foolish to depend entirely on that kind of a business-builder.
At best, it needs lots of time to do its good work. After a business is well established,
word-of-mouth advertising can do much to keep it going; but other types are required
to launch a new business or to pep up a puny one."
"What are some good types?" "Archie, of Archie's Radio Service, has spent more
money on advertising than anyone else in town, and he has kept a pretty close watch
on results; so all of us were interested in his opinions. He says that his most
spectacular results come from direct-mail advertising. Those return-postage double-cards
give you a chance to see exactly what results you are getting. He pointed out, though,
that you had to watch little things in that kind of advertising. For example, he
found that cards addressed by hand to specific persons brought in a far greater
return than those addressed on a typewriter or those sent to the 'occupant' at a
certain address. Apparently a lot of other people just glance at the less personal
ones and throw them into the wastebasket.
"He says that about the next best thing for quick results is a good-sized 'special'
ad in a newspaper. For example, a Spring or Fall flat-rate, 'clean-and-check' offer
invariably gets good results for him."
"How about running a small ad regularly?"
"Bill has a special angle on that sort of thing. He calls it 'riding the coattail
of the national advertisers.' By that he means that he tries to tie in his own advertising
with national advertising by big companies. As an example, the tube manufacturers
have spent millions of dollars implanting in the minds of the people that good tubes
mean good reception, and proof of how well they have done their job is contained
in how often we hear that phrase, 'I think it must be a tube.' Bill runs a little
ad continuously that simply says he tests tubes free of charge - meaning tubes out
of the set, of course. He says this inexpensive little ad pays for itself in tube
sales alone; but it also makes many new contacts for him and brings in several repair
jobs when it is found the trouble is not in the tubes."
"Does Archie think those big-as-a-bed-sheet calendars he puts out pay off?"
"Yes, he is convinced that they do. He says that lots of people who call him
say that they noticed the calendars. Those jobs cost better than a dollar each,
and he says there are several angles to be considered. For one thing, he tries to
put them into banks, beauty shops, license bureaus, and barber shops, as well as
taverns, garages, and pool rooms. That means that the picture must be one that is
acceptable in any company. In short, 'cheesecake' pictures are out. Another important
point is to have the calendar hung in a good place. That is why he always 'happens'
to have a tack hammer with him when he distributes a calendar and offers to put
it up himself - in the best possible place, naturally! The guys were trying to tell
that he wanted to hang one right in front of Judge Mull's bench, so that the judge
would have to peep around it to see the jury!"
"What do the fellows think about radio advertising?"
"George is the only one who has tried it, and he says it is good, but tricky.
Last month the radio station's advertising department fixed him up with one of those
if-your-radio-is-noisy-let-us-take-the-noise-out-of-it-for-you spot announcements,
and George said the results were amazing. The trouble was, though, that people wanted
the summer static taken out of their sets! George said he took quite a beating on
that, for he had to explain it was not that kind of noise he meant; but he turned
the whole thing to his advantage by making several FM sales that would cure the
static. From now on, though, he is going to weigh every word that goes into those
commercials.
"Lots of other points were brought up. Everyone said they used gummed stickers
to go on the backs of repaired sets; and we all confessed that we carefully peeled
off the other guy's sticker before we put on our own! Bob, whose store is on the
main stem, told us about building a bean-sorting, electric-eye 'crowd-stopper' and
putting it in his window. It brought him a nice increase in business and also a
write-up in the local newspaper.
"That started us riding Archie again about his knack of getting advertising 'for
free.' Remember when his kid won the soapbox derby in front of the largest crowd
the town has even seen, and the name painted on the winning car was 'Archie's Radio
Service'? Remember how that name loomed up in the front-page newspaper picture?
Then there was the time when he took those fine pictures of the ice-jam and let
the newspaper use them on the condition that they give the shop a credit line. That
made the front page, too. We decided that the rest of us could follow Archie's example
by using our hobbies to get us some free publicity."
"Fine!" Barney agreed enthusiastically. "Now take my hobby of collecting blondes:
we could have a bathing beauty contest, and Margie could be 'Miss Mac's Radio Service
Shop.' With me for a judge, how could she lose ?"
Mac's only comment on the idea was to clutch his nose firmly between thumb and
forefinger.
"Before we broke up," he went on, "we decided that it was all wrong to think
that advertising was only a method of taking business away from one another. Good
advertising can actually make business. You know how often people will put up with
noisy volume controls, slipping dial cords, weak reception, and so on, until the
set breaks completely down. The right kind of advertising could persuade the people
to bring these sets in and have these nuisances taken care of at once. Bob Lowe
hit the nail squarely on the head when he quoted Derby Brown at the Atlanta Town
Meeting:
" 'The business that considers itself immune to the necessity for advertising
sooner or later finds itself immune to business.' ''
Posted March 30, 2023
(updated from original post
on 1/5/2017)
Mac's Radio Service Shop Episodes on RF Cafe
This series of instructive stories was the brainchild of none other than John T.
Frye, creator of the Carl and Jerry series that ran in
Popular Electronics for many years. "Mac's Radio Service Shop" began life
in April 1948 in Radio News
magazine (which later became Radio & Television News, then
Electronics
World), and changed its name to simply "Mac's Service Shop" until the final
episode was published in a 1977
Popular Electronics magazine. "Mac" is electronics repair shop owner Mac
McGregor, and Barney Jameson his his eager, if not somewhat naive, technician assistant.
"Lessons" are taught in story format with dialogs between Mac and Barney.
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