The Hawaiian gazette. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu, Hawaii]) 1865-1918, 1903-10-30
GOOD ADVERTISING.

This journal has seen fit to criticise
some of the advertising work of the
| Promotion Committee because it be-
| lieves the methods chosen are mis-
representative of the country and Will
! do 1t harm. tut 1t is quite as willing
to help build good work as to aid
in tearing down bad one, and as a
hint towards better things it makes
the following suggestions
For large ma vazine advertisement
nothing could be better to start with
than Mark Twain's prose poem of Ha-
wall, printed in the center of the page
over his signature, the remaining space
being used to illustrate the scenery
Twain describes-the leaping cascades,
the garlanded craigs, the plumy palms
browsing by the shore etc, with some
room given besides for facts and fig
ures The value of such an adver-
tisement lies in the fact that every
body reads Mark Twain and believes
in him, and his 'tHawaii' being per-
haps his most finished work of lit
, erary art would be read everywhere
and have more influence upon the
public mind than anything the Promo
ton Committee could write for itself.
When Charles Dudley Warner pub
lshed our Italy" book on South
ern California, tens Of thousands of
dollars were spent in putting extracts
from it before the Eastern public;
but nothing in Warner was so spark
ling, so musical, so instantly and
hauntingly attractive to the reader
and so certain to be passed from
hand to hand, as Mark Twain's in
comparable tribute to the beauties of
Hawaii-nei.
In all the advertising done, care
should be taken to make the descrip-
tive terms used by the Promotion Com
mittee simple, fortnight and sane.
Much of the matter published on it's
authority in Ainslees Magazine sounds
bombastic and unreal. 1t departs from
the Mark Twain model in that it is
literature of the circus poster type.
People are not taken in any more by
resounding brag; and so familiar Is
this fact that the professional adver-
tisement writer's are known for their
cleverness and simplicity of style rath-
er than for their command of adjec-
tives and polysyllables. They get as
far as they can from the methods of
the Midway barker"
A tourist advertisement of Hawaii
should, first of all, anticipate the rea-
sonable questions tourist or home
seeker is likely to ask. Here are
some of the things he wants to know.
about:
Average winter '"nperature.
Hotel and boarding house accom-
modations.
Statistics of health.
Steamship facilities.
Church, school and medical accom-
modations.
ADJUSTMENTS and drives.
The tourist cares more for one con-
crete fact of the kind noted above
than he does about hundred rhe-
torical spasms over the "tincture of
the sea" and the efilorescence of the
clouds. He will take a thing like
Mark Twain's prose poem at its full
value; he does not mind having it
impressed on him that the tropics mean
summer in winter, providing he is not
smothered with the hysteria of self
praise. But after all he Is in search
of plain facts-of t., simple, unfrilled
truth.
Pictures are good things for us but
they should show life as 1t Is where
tourists find 1t, not as 1t might be on
inaccessible mountain peaks. To the
argument that snow actually exists on
the Hawaiian Sierras the answer is
that there are also places in the islands
where the rainfall is measured by feet.
But neither snow nor deluge is count
ed in the sum of common experience
here and it is simply imbecile to adj
vertise either one as an attraction to
tourists.