Letters to the Editor
WHAT ADVERTISING MIGHT BECOME
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sra,—It is a pity that Mr. Norman Angell should descend from the high flights of international politics, where be has such a reputation as a pilot, and concern, himself with any- thing so commercial as advertising, which he quite evidently does not even begin to understand.
Taking only one of the many false points which Mr. Angell makes, he speaks of seeing a million pounds' worth of advertising on one side of a railway line during a single hour's journey, and of a second million pounds' worth of competitive advertising on the other side of tha same railway line. I pass over the fact that it would be very difficult indeed to get ten thousand pounds' worth of advertising on to one side of a railway track that could be covered in an hour.
That Mr. Angell should be one thousand per cent. out in his figures does not surprise or worry me, but I am concerned with the assumption that one manufacturer of toothpaste could persuade us to clean our teeth and could provide all the toothpaste that we require. All human experience, certainly all advertising experience, denies this assumption. One advertiser selling one article will do a very limited trade ; two advertisers selling the same article will do between them much more than twice the trade of one ; ten advertisers selling the same article will create a market many hundreds of times as big as the market that could be created by a single advertiser.
I have dealt with this point very fully and very specifically in The Confessions of a Capitalist, where I have traced the results and given the figures of competition in a particular line over a period of twenty years. Mr. Norman Angell assumes that we all know all that we want and exactly what we want. He forgets that nine-tenths of the present-day necessities of life were to our grandfathers (who never cleaned their teeth) useless luxuries. Most of the things on which we depend to-day were unknown before advertising made us civilized, and the notion that the same good work could be done by a bureaucrat keeping a register is really not worthy of serious discussion.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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