The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1903-10-30
GOOD ADVERTISING.


some of the advertising work of the
Promotion Committee because it be-
neves the methods chosen are mis-
representative of the country and will
do it harm. Put it is quite as willing
to help build up good work as to aid
in tearing down bad one, and as
hint towards better things it makes
the following suggestions:
For large magazine 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 Hawaii" being per-
tIaNS has tIlOSl IlIISLcu VI III
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
lished "Our Italy, a 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 Ainslee's Magazine sounds
bornbastic and unreal. 1t departs from
the Mark Twain model in that 1t 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
cleyerness 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 ali, 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 temperature.
-, Hotel and boarding house accom-
modations.
Statistics of health.
Steamship facilities.
q Church, school ana medical accom-
modations.
Amusements and drives.
The tourist cares more for one con-
crete fact of the kind noted above
than he does about a hundred rhe-
torical spasms over the "tincture OF
the sea" and the effiorescence of the
clouds. He will take thing like
Mark Twain's prose poem at it's full
value; he does not mind having 1t
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 tie simple, unfrilled
truth.
Pictures are good things for US but
they should show life as it is where
tourists find it, not as it 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 ad-
yertise either one as an attraction to