ADVERTISING DAY BY DAY

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 193, 4 January 1913, Page 2

ADVERTISING DAY BY DAY

WHAT IT MEANS TO TRADE AND PUBLIC. (By Hiomas Russell, in the London Daily Express).

There are idealists who sigh for a world uncontaminated by commercial publicity, and for a newspaper with 110 advertisements in it. They hardly grasp, it is safe to affirm, the full significance of their aspirations. Such a daily paper would be an institution of greatly' diminished value all round, if only beeause, lacking the financial aid of advertising revenue, it would be crippled of its resources. Continental newspapers, wherein the development of advertising is much less advanced than in our own, have only to be compared for a moment with the London dailies in order to demonstrate this fact; and the French daily papers of the 'eighties-, of which the late Mr. Labouchere said that they were dated to-morrow, and carried the news of the day before yesterday, were typical of what all newspapers would, have to be if advertising did not exist.

PUBLIC BENEFIT. But the excuse for the advertisements in a daily paper is not merely the fact that the price of them enables a better paper to be produced. The advertisements are in themselves a public benefit. The householder who requires coals, or a butler, or a theatre ticket, or a house, or an investment—to name the first things that suggest themselves—turns to the daily paper for information about them. And while he is doing this, or while he reads the news of the day, gathered with painful research in all the corners of the world, he meets with unsought information on all sorts of topics, providently inserted for his benefit—and incidentally their own—by commercial advertisers.

No one will deny that a woman who can afford a vacuum cleaner, or a man who is not too unprogressive to make the experiment of buying a safety razor, tffi't better <?jf with these than with a broom or an old-style sliaving toe!.It has been rather cleverly said that civilised man differs from the Kaffir mainly in the number of his wants. Undoubtedly the advertisements in daily papers do add to the number of our wants, for the advertising which only supplies an existing requirement only does half its work. The best and most useful function of advertisements is precisely that of creating new needs.

THE MERCHANT'S FRIEND. Probably the greatest successes that have been made through the use of advertising are those in which daily papers have played the most prominent part. The influence «f advertising upon the public is an influence delicately psychological. No one who has studied intelligently the history of commercial success in advertising can have failed to be astonished by the elusiveness of the factors by which success is determined. The art of writing and designing advertisements is something more than a trade. It is often referred to as a "knack," but it is in truth a combination of experience and something like inborn genius. The successful advertisement writer, unless he has considered for years with a trained attention by no means always essential to his work the purport of certain minute factors in advertisement-making, can rarely explain why his writing ''sells the good." But it is safe to say, and no one whose opinion has the least authority will controvert the statement, that the daily newspaper is the advertising medium which affords the best opportunity to genius in advertising. There are modes of advertising where work of the second grade will give sufficient results. There are media of advertising where the best work hardly attains its full scope. But a daily paper demands the best work and gives the richest return from the best work. A really great advertisment writer will always prefer publication in an important daily, because he knows that in a daily paper good advertising is bound to win its reward.

THE TRUTH OF ADVERTISING. The daily paper lias had an" important moral influence upon commercial advertising, for the reason that while sincerity and fidelity to fact are important to all advertisers, it is in daily paper advertising that they are most important of all. An unfortunate tradition from the early, unscientific beginnings of advertising has left upon the public mind a deep-rooted conviction that advertising has a major element of exaggeration in it. This misapprehension will still take a long time to be lived down.

A well-known advertising man has lately spent his own money 011 a trumpet call for truth in advertising, and demanded consideration for a scheme of legislative control. The prejudice will not be corrected, nor will advertising be purified thus. The free press of our own day is purer than the censored press against which Milton launched the thunders of the "Areopagitiea."' Commercial self-interest will ultimately extinguish the last deceptive or exaggerated advertisement, because in daily papers sincerity in advertising must of necessity, and through the conditions of the case, be a strongly favorable handicap against the short-sighted advertiser who does not play the game. The daily newspaper has to live and keep its circulation by publishing what it believes to he the truth. It. is read only so long as it is credited; and the mood in which a daily paper reader peruses the news columns is the mood which he bring?, at the same time, to the advertising columns. Consequently, wherever daily paper advertising is well advised, well conceived and well executed, it will be truthful, intelligent, and an enormously beneficent public influence. It follows that the advertiser who has a good thing to sell and can afford to tell the truth about it finds in the daily paper his best medium of self-expression. Incidentally he finds this is a most, economical mouthpiece,, since he buys publicity on wholesale terms. The huge circulation of modern daily papers makes them economical to advertise in, for they can afford to give more publicity, sovereign for sovereign, than any other kind of press advertising.