WHAT ADVERTISING MIGHT BECOME

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]

8114—While quite a number of business men have thanked me for what they term useful hints in the series of articles on ," What Advertising Might Become," others have hurried into criticism of what were meant for constructive suggestions without having, it would seem, troubled to read the subject of their criticism.

As a summary of the points which I desired to make I wrote :—

" The true function of advertising is much less merely to push one man's wares as against another s, than to make better known to the public how they can avail themselves of the output of British industry in at present unrealized ways ; and to break down some of our conservatism about those new ways. Advertising in this sense is an indispensable element in the restoration and maintenance of posterity for a country like Britain, which more than any other whatsoever, perhaps, must adapt itself to the changing conditions of modern life. . . . Unless a great many adopt the new methods, nobody can adopt them. . . . And for everybody to know about the new things means large-scale advertising. . . . Advertising and its justification rests on the fact that it does not suffice merely to make known a fact to a man for him to act upon it. We are all so lazy, such creatures of routine, that we go on in our daily conduct ignoring the bit of new knowledge, and finally, maybe, forgetting it altogether, unless it is brought home to us again and again."

I suggested further that the underlying problem of all advertising—which is the effective bringing together of buyer and seller—even in that rudimentary form outlined by Montaigne four hundred years ago, had not yet in fact been solved, even in such old industries as farming ; that, in order to solve it, we might, in the case of agriculture, be compelled to have recourse to some form of agricultural co-operation like those developed in certain foreign countries, and that the most potent obstacle to the success of such plans was a psychological one, the inertia set up by old and familiar habits among a conservative people ; and that, in the over- coming of that inertia by persuasion, stimulation, suggestion, repetition, we should be compelled to resort to the more developed and scientific forms of advertising.

One would not have supposed there was much here capable of being misunderstood. But Sir Ernest Benn thus interprets it .-

" 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."

And Mr. Matthews, in a letter which accompanies Sir Ernest Benn's, says :-

" It is ridiculous tc speak of advertising as the ' noisy trumpeting of dubious wares' : are not some of our great thinkers and best artists employed in the profession ? Has not a government, a country, an empire, called advertising to its aid ? . . . Am I to advertise that I sell soap merely because someone is walking the streets of London with a dirty face, which might be detrimental to his character ? . . . Advertising is a science, an art, and the life-blood of modern commerce and industry, not a philanthropic institution."

I did not say, of course, that advertising was the noisy trumpeting of dubious wares ; I said that some forms of it, especially some forms familiar in the past, were, and implied that the public were apt to think of it in that connexion. I never suggested that advertising was a philanthropic insti- tution, and in my articles appealed to no motive save that of the economic interest of the business man (not failing to point out, however, that that interest was bound up with the commercial welfare of the country as a whole). I made no proposal for putting advertising into the hands of a bureaucrat keeping a register or into the hands of bureaucracy at all. In pointing out that that fundamental function of bringing buyer and seller together, even in the very rudi- mentary way in which Montaigne outlined it four hundred years ago, was still inadequately performed, I suggested that in agriculture something more systematic and scientific than country markets or jobbers might have to be devised, some form of clearing house. But the context plainly shows that I had in mind an organization run by the farmers themselves, some form of that co-operation which works so well in certain foreign countries that do better with farming than we do. But I said not a word about government bureaucracies taking it over.

And Sir Ernest adds this note to the discussion :-

" It is a pity that Mr. Norman Angell should descend from the high flights of international politics, where he has such a reputation as a pilot, and concern himself with anything so commercial 88 advertising, which he quite evidently does not even begin to understand."

Perhaps. But the remark compels me to be " personal " in a sense different from that in which one would apply the term to the above quotation.

For nearly twenty years I was associated with businesses that had a great deal to do with advertising ; for ten years I was the managing director of a newspaper company dependent, among other things, upon the sale of advertising space. It

was a successful company, and sold, under my direction, a great deal of space to advertisers in every country in Europe. It made part of a group owned by capitalists, quite unusually successful, who were not in the habit of keeping at the head of their concerns managers who did not " even begin to know " the business it was their job to direct. They may have been mistaken, of course, and have failed in the ten years to discover it ; but still? they were in a somewhat better position than Sir Ernest Benn to know the extent of my knowledge, or ignorance, as the case may be.

And since retiring from that business which made me very familiar with Continental methods, I have been, perhaps five or six years altogether, in America, comparing American methods with British and European. A man must have been deaf and blind to have escaped from the experience without carrying away a notion or two that should be useful to the British business world to-day.—I am, Sir, &c.,

NORMAN ANGELL.