Effective Advertising

Comparing National Pastime advertisements with APBA

Effective Advertising

After posting about the first APBA Sporting News advertisement the other day, I thought it might be interesting to compare that advertisement with the only National Pastime advertisement we are aware of.

First comes National Pastime. Clifford Van Beek’s one and only Sporting News advertisement came on the bottom of page 8 of the December 11, 1930 edition of The Sporting News. Can you spot it?

Here’s a closeup:

Now, for comparison, look at page 36 of the April 25, 1951 edition of The Sporting News:

It’s a lot easier to find the APBA advertisement, isn’t it?

Now, you need to realize that neither of these games was successful at the start. While we don’t know how many copies of National Pastime actually sold, we do know that Clifford Van Beek had 500 copies of the game printed, and that he didn’t sell enough to pay off his printer. I wrote more about that here:

APBA, meanwhile, didn’t show a profit until somewhere around 1955. Per the latest edition of The Zack Handbook, only 135 copies of APBA’s 1950 season sold out of the 137 that were printed:

Based on what I’ve read in the past, I believe that it took Seitz over a year to finally sell all 135 copies of the 1950 season.

Now, there are two advantages that Seitz had over Clifford Van Beek. One is that Seitz was simply a better businessman. Instead of going for broke and making a large printing order for a game that had absolutely no market presence and unclear demand, Seitz made a much more conservative order. Though we know that Seitz didn’t get out of the red that first year, he certainly didn’t go into unsustainable levels of debt for his efforts.

The second Seitz advantage was his understanding of how advertising worked.

If you compare the two advertisements, you’ll notice a few things:

• The APBA ad is larger. Seitz fit in 5 paragraphs of text and a complete address. Van Beek wrote a single paragraph with a small and very unclear advertisement, and wrote in only a generic address. I should note that I’m not particularly familiar with post office mailing conventions in 1930; it’s certainly possible that addressing a letter to “Major Games Co., Green Bay, Wisconsin” would be enough to get an order in.

• The APBA ad is more prominent. Sure, being on page 36 isn’t that much better than being on page 8. However, the APBA ad is the second largest ad on the page and stands out a lot more.

• APBA’s ad is more accurate. I’m not sure what Van Beek meant by “one, two or up to twelve can play.” Only 2 people can play National Pastime (and, technically, it’s the sort of game that “plays itself”). Seitz, meanwhile, correctly notes that APBA allows for sacrifice bunts, intentional walks, bringing the infield in, player substitution, and so on.

• APBA’s ad is a tad more descriptive. Calling APBA “a new and different, scientific baseball game” strikes me as more effective than describing National Pastime as “a true-to-life baseball game - not like another game.” All Van Beek could write was “Nothing like it on the market - new and fascinating,” which doesn’t compare well to Seitz’ “in batting, slugging, base stealing, fielding and pitching their records and averages will always ben unbelievably similar.”

Seitz worked in politics for a few years following his exit from the army, and is well known for being fascinated with advertising and printing. And, in my opinion, Seitz’ instincts for what made good advertisements was the biggest difference between his venture and Van Beek’s early attempt.

If you have a scanned copy of the original 1951 APBA brochure mentioned in his advertisement, please contact me. Similarly, if you have a copy of “Forty Years of APBA,” either printed or scanned, that you would be willing to part with, please let me know.