Cato's Follow-up System

If a man lambasted you on the eye and walked away and waited a week before he repeated the performance, he wouldn't hurt you very badly. Between attacks you would have an opportunity to recover from the effect of the first blow.

But if he smashed you and kept mauling, each impact of his fist would find you less able to stand the hammering, and a half-dozen jabs would probably knock you down.

Now advertising is, after all, a matter of hitting the eye of the public. If you allow too great an interval to elapse between insertions of copy the effect of the first advertisement will have worn away by the time you hit again. You may continue your scattered talks over a stretch of years, but you will not derive the same benefit that would result from a greater concentration. In other words, by appearing in print every day, you are able to get the benefit of the impression created the day before, and as each piece of copy makes its appearance, the result of your publicity on the reader's mind is more pronounced—you mustn't stop short of a knock-down impression.

Persistence is the foundation of advertising success. Regularity of insertion is just as important as clever phrasing. The man who hangs on is the man who wins out. Cato the Elder is an example to every merchant who uses the newspapers and should be an inspiration to every storekeeper who does not. For twenty years he arose daily in the Roman senate and cried out for the destruction of Carthage. In the beginning he found his conferees very unresponsive. But he kept on every day, month after month and year after year, sinking into the minds of all the necessity of destroying Carthage, until he set all the senate thinking upon the subject and in the end Rome sent an army across the Mediterranean and ended the reign of the Hannibals and Hamilcars over northern Africa. The persistent utterances of a single man did it.

The history of every mercantile success is parallel. The advertiser who does not let a day slip by without having his say, is bound to be heard and have his influence felt. Every insertion of copy brings stronger returns, because it has the benefit of what has been said before, until the public's attention is like an eye that has been so repeatedly struck, that the least touch of suggestion will feel like a blow.