TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ADVERTISEMENT.
THE newspapers during the past week have rightly given a very large amount of space to the Inter- national Advertising Convention—a body which began its meetings on Monday. The subject is one of vital importance, and neither the Prince of Wales, who opened the Conference, nor President Coolidge, who contributed a weighty message, overdid their comments, though both treated the gathering in a tone of high seriousness.
Advertisement can no longer be treated as the chatter of the cheap jack, or the babble of the salesman. It is a world-force ; the business side of that great, perhaps supreme, function in the conduct of the relations between man and man, and man and his environment, which we know as publicity. Publicity is the conduit pipe of knowledge. Without it we could not develop, nay, could hardly live, except in the animal sense. We should be like hyenas prowling in the darkness of a world-wide cavern.
Obviously there is no need for any apology for treating the Advertising Convention as the first of our Topics of the Day. But, though everybody acknowledges the importance of the art and science of advertisement, it is by no means certain that either the advertiser or the public at large fully understand the nature of advertisement, what it is that the advertiser is doing, and why it is of such importance that he should continue to do it. The first great quality of advertisement is that it is dynamic. It is a form of movement, or, at any rate, is designed to put us in motion and to keep us moving. Why is such movement beneficial ? Because movement, i.e., activity, is as necessary to the health of the body politic as to that of the body natural. Only those nations which have been dynamic have prospered, and done great things in the world. The little Semitic tribe of the hill country of Judea, which affected the world so deeply and in so many ways, unquestionably owed a great deal of its vitality and force to the fact that its religious impulses kept it on the move. The obligation for all good Jews, men, women and children, to visit Jerusalem at least once a year gave to the scattered inhabitants of the villages from Dan to Beersheba a quickness of mind and a sense of brotherhood and co-operation which belonged to no other rural population in the ancient world. The Hebrew polity had great faults ; but, at any rate, it was never a static community. Adam Smith, in one of those wonderful asides, with which The Wealth of Nations is crowded, tells us that " The Progressive State is in reality the cheerful and hearty State to all the different orders of the Society. The Stationary is dull ; the Declining, melancholy." Advertisement in its widest sense does an immense deal to keep the State progressive and dynamic, and so in good heart. How does advertisement do all this in the world of commerce ? It does it by setting the ball of trade rolling.
" You want a safety-razor," says the advertiser. " You don't know-it ; but you do, and if you will listen I will tell -you why." Jones,' the potential purchaser, listens, and soon says to himself : " By Jove I He's right. I do." The electric spark of suggestion has done its work. A demand has been created 'in the man's mind, and so value attached to the article. The next step is for Smith to say " How can I get a safety- razor? "—" By paying 5g. for it."—" HoW can -I,-get 5s. ? "—" By making something' to. exchange "for it."— " All right. I'll set to work at once," &c., &c., (A worldly critic has suggested that an even better way is to create the sense of demand in Mrs. Jones, then she is sure to see that Jones's good intentions of earning money with which to buy a razor will not evaporate in masculine indolence but will become a reality.) Thus the world is fertilized and human activity created, and the community made dynamic. Thus the a-dvertisers become the apostles of the economic science.
Though they do not by any means always know it, the advertisers are engaged in instructing the world in the great central truths of economics. They are showing mankind what wealth is and what barter, and how they function. They are teaching the world, in fact;though those who come from a Tariff-ridden country may deny it with their lips, that he who will not buy, neither shall he sell. They teach also, in essence, how credit, by anticipating wealth, • becomes the great produce-getter of the world, and how currency, the handmaid of credit, is but a memorandum of the barter transaction. In a word, they teach the world that trade is always a double benefit, and that buying and selling are in truth the same thing though seen from a different angle. If they had time to stop and think in their impetuous activities, there are many other secrets which they would be able to convey to mankind ; for example, that there can be no wealth where there is no exchange. That is why war expenditure and reparations expenditure, both exchangeless transactions, are of the nature of waste: There is no wealth in them.
But this is beside our present purpose. The advertiser may well be content with his immediate function, which, as we have said, is to create demand, and so to attach the quality of exchangeability and • value. This may sound like mere materialism ; but it is not so in reality, or rather it is the kind of materialism out of which will grow that equality in the possession of the amenities of life, and that freedom of action which can only be obtained through a general abundance of the things men desire and need. If it is true, as no doubt it is that mankind is freest when most highly organized, so it is true that the spirit of man is freest when commerce is most efficient. It is by exchange, and not by trying to be self-sufficing in all things, that men can get the best out of the world. If men did not exchange, they could only just keep themselves alive, in a condition " nasty, brutish, and short," and by unceasing toil. And so advertisement, by helping commerce, that is by helping exchange, is helping to emancipate mankind.
No sane person can want to use advertisement to scourge mankind into unnecessary production. Adver- tisement carries with it a system of compensation and adjustment: You can advertise a play, a concert, a picture gallery, or a beautiful piece of scenery, as well as you can advertise a razor, or a crow-bar, a toilet soap, a lip-stick or a powder puff for Beauty's face. Advertisement will make- the poet's verses known to you, as Well as the newest "brand of cigarettes. The words of the philosopher and of the spiritual guide can be brought home by the illumination of publicity quite as effectively as things material. Therefore, let no man think, at- a time when the world's production of material things far short of .man's requirements, and advertisement is chiefly taken up with _ stimu- lating corporeal and material demands, that its action is limited. There are, besides, entirely new worlds for advertisement to conquer. Some day it may be the essential instrument of rule, the method of reward, and the method of punishment. Advertisement has been a helot ; is now a prosperous bourgeois. Some day it
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