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and stock-watering. Full and complete publicity would practically do away with these and kindred bad practices and crimes which are constantly recurring and for which the public has no redress at present."

The United States Steel Company, through its public reports to stockholders, has shown its growing recognition of the value of publicity, and some day we shall surely see it among the real advertisers. Not only will it advertise to increase the use of steel but will tell its bigger story to the people.

Roughly estimated, the Standard Oil Companies put three million dollars a year into advertising their products, and perhaps may be considered the biggest advertisers; but these corporations have so far missed the benefits they will surely find at no distant time in talking confidentially to the public of their work, problems, and aims. So have the great corporations that produce or handle leather, matches, alcohol, fertilizers, sugar, coal, ice, and tobacco. The American Tobacco Company's advertising expenditure now is estimated at two million a year. In time most of the great corporations will come into the bigger advertising-the business insurance either voluntarily or through the pressure of competitors' goodwill publicity. Some of them, indeed, have already begun to talk, but for the most part in a whisper-the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, for instance.

I doubt if it will be long before the legitimate interests of Wall Street will arouse themselves from their long silence and tell the people, through this logical vehicle of communication, that they will no longer be classed with the underworld of finance. A couple of years ago Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank in New York, voiced this need of bank publicity when he said: "We have stood defenseless in the eyes of the public too long. . . . We have permitted a picture of business practices and methods to be held up to the voters, and many honestly believe that success in business is obtained by roguery. Our task is to inform the public of the truth. . . .”

For many years the banks of this country saw no opportunity in advertising, and even now it is only here and there

that we find examples of aggressive bank publicity. In the midst of the greatest opportunity the United States has ever seen for building up bank deposits, there has been comparatively little effort to capitalize the prosperity of the last year or two. Nevertheless, a thrift campaign has been inaugurated by the American Bankers' Association, intended to teach the public the value of saving. No doubt a vast aggregate of money is lying hidden in stockings, mattresses, clothes' linings, and in the ground. But this is a mere bagatelle beside the money that is spent wastefully but which might go into the banks. There are, however, striking instances of a certain kind of bank advertising, such as the publicity of the Bankers Trust Company and Guaranty Trust Company, both of New York. The latter bank, for instance, has hit the fundamental that genuine service is, of itself, a good form of advertising. Following out this idea, the Guaranty Trust Company has issued scores of booklets, some of them really books, that interpret contemporaneous business legislation and similar subjects. This literature has been in great demand.

A remarkable example of the bigger advertising is that of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, which every year invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in a lofty form of publicity, far above the mere selling of phone service. This company has a great message for the people. And I ought to mention here the Western Union Telegraph Company, for this too came under the influence of Theodore N. Vail.

Something like a decade ago the Western Union, although a far-reaching corporation, was stagnant. Then came Mr. Vail, with his masterful imagination, and found all sorts of new products to sell, to which he gave a true dramatic touch. In rapid succession were evolved the night letter, day letter, week-end letter, weekend cable, and other forms of service. Twenty thousand Western Union offices out of its 25,000 had not paid expenses, but advertising played a part in rejuvenating this moribund Western Union and the public was taught to use the telegram for social and domestic affairs as well as for business.

The Borden Company recently sought refuge in big-space advertising, to put its case squarely up to the people; and there can be no doubt that public hostility was softened. The Interborough Company, operating the New York subways, has found something of a voice in offsetting the ill feeling of the people who are jammed into its cars. Public-utility corporations here and there are beginning to talk. Surely we are at the dawn of the bigger advertising.

In the publicity of the rubber companies we find strong tendencies toward the larger message; and in the advertisements of rubber and many other national commodities we also read the development of our new civilization. It is only some seventy-five years ago that the first rubber factory was established, and advertising has done strange things to the old rubberless world. One advertisement of the United States Rubber Company asks the question: "What would a rubberless world be like to-day?" To prevent a reversion to such mediævalism, expansive rubber plantations have been established, one in Sumatra being larger than Manhattan Island. So the advertising story reaches to the South Seas. Estimates of the Goodyear advertising place it around a million and a half a year, and that of the Goodrich Company somewhere in the same category.

The railroads furnish some interesting examples, for many of them are awakening to the value of advertising in gaining the good-will of the people. In former years the main idea of railroad advertising was to sell transportation, and of this kind of publicity we have numerous splendid examples. Years ago the New York Central began to advertise its Empire State Express, and made it the bestknown train in the country. Since then this line has done other conspicuous train advertising. A Chicago newspaper offered a prize for the best answer to the question, "What is the most famous train in the world?" and out of 25,000 replies 23,700 people wrote: "The Twentieth Century Limited." The Lehigh Valley has long featured its Black Diamond Express, and we all know the Lake Shore Limited, Wolverine, Oriental Limited, Olympian, and so on.

But now the railroads are finding some of the big things in publicity. Last year, when the great strike was threatened, they jumped into a campaign of newspaper advertising, employing 17,000 publications. It was the first time the railroads generally had engaged in a joint advertising effort to put their cause up to the people. In 1916 the New York Central began a campaign to change the attitude of the public. The Southern Railway has used 100 newspapers in a good-will campaign, and the Union Pacific is doing similar advertising.

In Illinois a co-operative campaign has recently been conducted to discover the causes for the antipathy of the public. "What do you think of the railroads?" is the caption on one of these advertisements. The Pennsylvania Railroad began a measure of this sort some years ago, when it first resolved to make public the details of accidents, and it has extended this publicity. In Kansas thirteen railroads have advertised in 600 newspapers, telling the conditions now confronting the carriers.

Quite recently we have an example of the growth of the advertising idea in railroad circles in the campaign of the Pullman Company, which during all these years seems to have overlooked possibilities.

In the street-railway field there is a big unworked opportunity for advertising, though in some instances street-car companies have climbed aboard the advertising wagon. I find a report showing that the Central Electric Railway Association last year began an investigation of advertising as a means of increasing its passenger traffic. The jitney has aroused the street-car fraternity to the possibilities of paid advertising. Already streetcar companies in Detroit and Chicago have become advertisers for traffic; and doubtless others.

Perhaps a reflection of the newer railroad publicity may be seen in the work of the Detroit Board of Commerce, which, instead of fighting the railroads, undertook to work with them and started advertising to further the unloading of freight-cars. Within twelve days the congestion in Toledo was one of empty cars instead of loaded ones. In Detroit alone

the number of cars unloaded in one day was two hundred in excess of the best previous day's record.

Most people have no conception of the problems of the railroads and know little about the arguments from the railroad's standpoint. They are actuated chiefly by the conceptions they get from contact with trainmen and by reports of wrecks and claim-suits. In reality the public has a deep interest in this good-will factor the railroads are trying to develop. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, has 94,000 stockholders; the Santa Fe, 43,000; Baltimore & Ohio, 38,000; Union Pacific, 30,000; New Haven, 26,000; New York Central, 25,000; Great Northern,

24,000.

A recent tabulation of the advertising of thirteen large railroad systems shows that their aggregate expenditure was more than $4,000,000 a year; but when we consider the vast capitalization involved this seems a small total. Railroad advertising is in its infancy, and the good-will publicity now being conducted is mostly of the eleventh-hour variety. Railroad managers are just beginning to realize that they have long neglected to put their purposes before Congress and the people in that most logical of all publicity, paid advertising.

The total capital stock of the railroads in 1915 was $8,635,000,000, of which $6,000,000,000 was in the hands of the general public. And then the vast bondholdings of the people! Yet in spite of the manifest interest of the public in public utilities, common carriers, and other large enterprises, the people themselves constitute the class that advertises the least. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the public has never advertised. In all or most of the disputes between capital and labor the people have been silent. But in the future the people will advertise, in groups or by communities, and the combined voice is bound to be an important factor in economic questions.

There is, of course, much advertising by the public for the purpose of selling more tangible commodities. Santa Clara County, Cal., recently tried the experiment of having a county advertising manager, and used space in leading magazines

and farm journals. Ten thousand replies came in. What the ultimate results will be cannot be estimated now, though the possibilities in municipal, county, and state advertising are as wide as Our boundaries. Most exploitation of this sort has been done by real-estate concerns, some of them of doubtful reputation.

In the records of advertising I find a report of $100,000 raised by Cincinnati to exploit that city.

During the last ten years the biggest recruit in the national advertising field has been the automobile, and the WillysOverland was credited last year with a publicity investment around two millions. The total expenditure in print, in 1916, for the advertising of passenger automobiles has been estimated around $25,000,000 and for motor-trucks $2,500,000. The advertisements of passenger cars undoubtedly were a big factor in the gross business of more than a billion dollars. For trucks the gross is estimated at a quarter of this figure. It is not difficult to imagine how this automobile advertising has expanded the market and put further into the future that intangible thing known as the saturation-point. Benjamin Franklin's prospective mother-in-law was opposed to him on the ground that he was engaged in a badly overcrowded business, there being some half-dozen periodicals in the country. But saturation-points expand with advertising.

The advertising of products co-operatively has made rapid strides. One of the best examples is the California Fruit Growers' Exchange, which began in 1907 with an expenditure of $6,900 and has an appropriation this year of $400,000. Through this advertising the consumption of California citrus fruits has increased in the last seven years six and a half times as rapidly as the population of the United States. About 330 newspapers are now being used.

Following this example, a group of men formed the Northwestern Fruit Exchange, which through advertising has become the largest shipper of boxed apples in the world. In 1914 the apple crop of this country exceeded 259,000,000 bushels, a gain of 114,000,000 bushels over 1913. Yet this was of little benefit to the growers, because they had no adequate out

let. A million bushels of fruit were fed to live stock, and it is estimated that in 1913 and 1914 only forty per cent of the entire crop ever reached the consumer. The answer to the situation lay in cooperative advertising, which must be the answer in other similar dilemmas. The apple-growers of the United States, in 1915, are said to have lost $8,000,000 through the cutting off of export outlets for the big crops. If co-operative advertising had been undertaken a few years earlier, home markets could have been developed.

The California raisin-growers are also following the lead of the other fruit-producers in the marketing of crops, and the situation as to prunes is similar. The total production of this latter fruit for three years was 549,000,000 pounds, of which only a little more than half was consumed in the United States. Germany was the largest foreign customer, but when the war came this foreign market was closed. The situation is summed up in a circular sent out by a San José bank: "We have an enormous American consuming power, and in former years this took the bulk of our products, but we neglected this when Europe overbid us in prices and our domestic demand has become dormant. American trade follows American advertising. Breakfast foods have become a popular demand because they have been advertised largely. We can build up a similar demand for our dried prunes and apricots by systematic advertising."

Another instance of co-operative work is that of the California Walnut Growers' Association. The comparatively small amount of national advertising done by this body has increased consumption to a considerable extent.

In the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario there was a great surplus of plums, peaches, and cherries, due to the war, and it looked as if the farmers would be heavy losers. A comparatively small outlay in intelligent publicity resulted in the disposal, at fair prices, of practically the entire output.

In 1916 the Seabrook Farm, at Bridgeton, N. J., captured a New York market with over 500,000 quarts of strawberries by giving them a trade-name and advertising.

One of the spectacular developments of publicity is the big electrical displays. Those who rail against the poster and electric sign might well consider what New York would be like without its "Great White Way," which is only advertising in fire. What would any of our cities be like minus the flashing sign? These electric signs play an important part in our night life and have become a brilliant factor in advertising itself. William Wrigley pays $54,000 a year for an electric sign at Times Square, in New York, and $18,000 for another New York sign, this latter seen nightly by 200,000 people. In 4,000 cities and towns there are bill-posting plants.

Aside from the main channels, advertising is the comforter of many people in queer ways. In order to move a stagnant lot of loganberries, the Willamette Valley Prune Association undertook to promote the eating of loganberry pie, using space in twenty-two newspapers, including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Detroit, and St. Louis. In Chicago 200 restaurants began using this pie. There were 175,000 pounds of evaporated loganberries in New York and Chicago on consignment, and the jobbers and brokers had reported no demand. This campaign compelled the market.

Bemis Brothers Bag Company, desiring to increase its output, undertook an extensive campaign for white flour-not for flour-bags, which manifestly would have been absurd. This company realized the value of advertising in presenting the other side of the use of white flour, that oft-attacked staple that has gone largely undefended. This campaign was addressed to a circulation of nearly 8,000,ooo people. In "ready-cut houses,' so largely advertised, one company is said to be doing a business of $1,500,000 a year and, according to report, plans are made to market thousands of ready-cut houses in Belgium when the war is over. Incidentally, the ready-cut advertising has stimulated the regular lumber-dealers to do creative work and to advertise.

A Baltimore garment-factory found an unusual use for advertising when it began telling labor about its ideal factory conditions, comfortable surroundings, and the high average of the workers' earnings.

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The Long Island Railroad cut down its grade-crossing accidents heavily by advertising. Before the campaign ten or twelve persons a year were killed at its crossings; but in 1915 and 1916 an average of four. The Liberty Bell Bird Club of Philadelphia gained 300,000 members through advertising its "Help Save the Birds." A Missouri association increased the number of cremations thirty-five per cent in three months through paid space. Politics in late years have come rather extensively into the paid advertising field. It is even asserted that President Wilson owes his last election to the newspaper campaign of the Democratic National Committee. The Republicans seemed to hesitate over the value of this voice.

A comparatively recent convert to advertising is the church. The Messiah Lutheran Church of Philadelphia used newspaper space, window cards, and billposting. When the advertising began the membership was 215, but rose to 606. The Sunday School had only 175, but grew to 510. At Cedar Rapids, Ia., the First Christian Church doubled its Sunday-school attendance in two years. The Warren Memorial Presbyterian Church of Louisville, in a four weeks' newspaper campaign, increased its Sunday-night attendance from 100 to 800. It is estimated that there are 50,000,000 people in the United States without church affiliation, so the possibilities of analytical church advertising are large.

A market still bigger is said to be that of life-insurance, for it is estimated that less than ten per cent of the insurable life hazard in the United States is covered as compared with eighty per cent of the fire risk. Or take the cause of education. Not many years ago Northwestern University, at Evanston, Ill., brought down criticism by engaging in a paid advertising campaign in the newspapers. But the ethics of this are now recognized. The time is coming when every university will advertise, as part of its business necessity.

In New York the clothing manufacturers had been encroaching steadily on the retail district, so that Fifth Avenue, from Fourteenth to Twenty-third Streets, and the streets adjacent had virtually surrendered. It looked as if this army of

clothing workers would extend northward and absorb even the high-class retail district. But that mighty power, advertising, was invoked. The "Save New York" movement, with space in the newspapers, brought an agreement by which the clothing manufacturers consented to remove to sections of the city better adapted to their line. Yet property values between Fourteenth and Twentythird Streets had decreased from $28,o00,000 to $17,500,000.

There is one important phase of advertising that borders closely on fiction, and millions of dollars are regularly invested by hard-headed business men in this kind of publicity. It is the story-advertisement, of which there have been notable examples, one in particular that of an automobile company. These stories took the reader to ride in a fast, powerful car, and the dramatic action was so great that the sales are said to have jumped. From an article by Newton A. Fuessle, in Printers' Ink, I quote a vivid example of the story in advertising; and if it stood by itself this might be taken as a scene from a popular novel:

"Something ruddy tinged the gloom outside my door when I awoke. I smelt smoke. crib, grabbed Bobs from her bed, and called "I made a panicky jump for Baby in her frantically to Jimmy.

"I sprang to the head of the stairs with the two children and took one wild look at the red

pack of flames that had already cut off our escape."

The advertising-copy writer often finds the conditions confronting him quite similar to those of the literary worker. He must clothe his point in human action that will grip the attention. Thus:

"And then night fell. Adrift in open boats, the crew of the steamer Kanawha-abandoned 95 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras had given up practically all hope. But by a twist of fate one of the crew on leaving the sinking steamer had taken in his pocket an Ever-Ready Flashlight."

There can be no doubt that some of the best advertising of to-day is written in story form, and the future of the advertising story promises to be more and more important. Just as the imaginative ad

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