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, 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 January 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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