NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING

Taupo Times, Volume II, Issue 69, 13 May 1953, Page 5

NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING

Every nian, woman and ehild in the country is vitally affected by advertising. What we eat, what we wear, what we have in our homes, the car we buy, where we go for onr holidays, are all in some degree influenced by advertising. But beyond. that directly personal effect of advei-tising upon us, there iis the nrach more important indirect effect due to the intimate relationship between advertising and modern business. The* very eomplex system of modern civilised commerce and business could not possibly carry on wiithout advertising. And of the various media of advertising perhaps the most important is represented by the newspaper and other periodicals. A method by which the mfinite variety of goods available for and reciuired by the people of a civilised country car, be made known is essen■tial, and newspaper advertising provides that method. But advertising is of prime importance from the fact that, without it, modern newspapers as we know them could not exist. It is by the advertising they carry that they are enabled to meet the costs of their production. No paper or journal without the revenue derived from advertising could be produced at a price that would enable it to be bought regularly day by day by the mass of the people.

Readers .of papers are sometimes heard to comment on advertising in a way that would indicate that they did not realise that without advertising there could be no paper. That. however, is the case. To meet its costs -a newspaper must have more of its space devoted to advertisements than is given to news and comment. A point that is often overlooked by many is that there is not a hard and fast line between news and advertising. To a large proportion of newspaper readers there is a very real interest in the advertisements, an interest just as real, even if of a different sort, as that held: for them by the news columns. If this were not so, of course, business people would not advertise. Advertisements must be read to be of value to those who pay for their insertion, and the advertising regularly carried by newspapers is its own proof that it is read.