A Playing Pack
THE TRADE REVIVAL.
A certain prominent business firm has, we note with approval, suggested that in the present crisis the idea of industrial co-operation should be extended to the realms of advertising. To us the scheme appears radiant with unlimited and fascinating possibilities. In a world in which, we are assured, nothing can be sold without advertisement, the ruthlessly individualistic policy pursued by so many firms has frequently been denounced by us as being but a speedway leading to disaster. Indeed we should not be surprised• the present financial situation were its direct outcome.
Fortune has, however, provided us with a moral to measure. If advertisers, instead of exposing invitations to purchase their wares in an arbitrary and haphazard manner, were only to combine and place them in positions having some logical connexion with one another, how great would be both our gain and theirs !
Consider, for instance, a random illustration, the case of the slogan : " Give puppy Glisten to make his coat shine ! " Quite so ! But what of the humiliating possibility that puppy may be too heavily dosed with the mysterious fluid ? What then ? Will he be compelled to eke out the remainder of an embarrassed existence with his coat in a state of eternal and preternatural brilliance ? For all we know his panoply will affect his brain, his physical and moral fibres will be undermined, and he will bite the district nurse and savage the vegetable-marrow at the harvest festival. He will probably develop rabies in the local orphanage or run amok at the baby show.
And how simply this tragedy could have been avoided if next to the advertisement for Glisten, instead of something hopelessly inconsequent about " Making the soup delicious," or Doing the laundry in half the time," there had been displayed the firm reminder that " If puppy's hair is too brittle give him Glisten to make it firm and strong." Two spoonfuls instantly administered and the world would have been a different place. The principle, of course, can be extended to anything. The purchase, say, of an engagement ring leads automatically to the choosing of a trousseau, the question of where to spend the honeymoon, the problem of where to pawn the wedding presents, the selection of a resi- dence, the acquisition of another nurse, the complications attendant upon additions to the family, the choice of schools, the mysteries of insurance, the necessities of old age, the reservation of a berth in the crematorium and the erection of a monument. All are problems which individually bristle with difficulties, but with their corresponding advertisements placed in their proper order, neatly tabulated in chronological sequence, would be automatically answered.
And think of the benefit to " our hard-hit railways." Stations, instead of being dusty tabernacles of a dreary officialdom, would be endowed with the glamour of Delphic oracles.
There is one further point. In these democratic days should we not all be cheered by the sight of our less-hermitical peeresses beaming their recommendations from the hoardings
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