Evening Star Newspaper, April 21, 1929, Page 8

Business 15 at the crossroads— ~which path will you follow? An article, reprinted by courtesy of Printer’s Ink, in which a blight that has fallen on present-day business 1s 1solated, MUCH PRESENT DAY ADVERTISING reduced to its raw and unlovely essence is just 2 species of glorified rooster crowing. We all know " chanticleer. He celebrates not merely himeelf and herself, and her egg, but the eggs of many nest-mates yet to be. And so with this advertis- ing. It crows not only about the products which it apostrophizes but ascribes to them practically all of the felicities of life. The cigarette has become almost a health food — certainly a weight reducer. The humble cake of soap has risen far above its modest mission of cleansing and confers the precious boon of beauty upon whosoever shall faithfully wash. The motor car is a sign manual of social election. It is an engine of .business efficiency. It is a mechanical miracle and its creators demi-gods. It and he are so many great things that it requires an expenditurefof nearly one hundred million dollars 2 year simply to catalog them. Beauty, health, learning and success are no longer the hard won rewards of virtue, character, educa- tion and endeavor. They can be bought in the first drug store or bookshop. The shelves of almost every shop are laden especially with health. We are all glowing and sparkling and snapping and tingling with -health, by way of the tooth brush and the razor and the shaving cream and the face lotion and the deodorant and a dozen other brightly packaged gifts of the gods. Sometimes we can even extractan almost dangerous vigor and virility of sex from the same precious vackages. * * g SCIENCE HAS BEEN CHAINED to the chariot of advertising. We know, because we have seen pic- tured a thousand times, stern looking scientists and the necessary treatment of it is suggested By THEODORE F. MacMANUS ~m MACMANTUS INCORPORATED attired in dentists’ white drill jackets peering por- tentously through microscopes and test tubes and producing— miraculous motor oils, or life-giving gasolines, or epoch-making tooth pastes or what- will-you. What is the significance of all this—are we all supremely silly or is only advertising silly? There is warrant for the dark suspicion that ad- vertising is but the symptom of a disease. It would be horrible and humiliating to have to admit that we are as far gone as a reading of the news columns of almost any daily newspaper would indicate. But in defense of advertising, it should be borne in mind that advertising must perforce appeal alike to the susceptibility of those who are far gone, those who are not quite so far gone, those who are intelligent, and those who are mildly insané—the latter category generously opening wide its arms to include nearly all of us. Broadly speaking, the advertiser cannot afford to care whether his prospect is immune to the hypnosis of Aimee Semple- McPherson or grows glassy-eyed under the spell of her voodooistic in- cantations, He must endeavor desperately to strike an average. The truth of the matter is that he is forever torn between the two harassing questions—how high dare I go and how low must I sink. Roughly speaking, those who live almost exclu- sively on a néwspaper diet are intellectual illit- eratésand he must take that fact into consideration. If he followed the strict letter of fact he would class all of those who consider Eddie Guest a great poet or the late Dr. Frank Crane s sound philosopher as mental infants or adolescents not to say defectives. Gem-ude’ Stein is a human being in spite of the- almostinhuman incoherence of her style-of-speech and she and all of her adherents must be taken into account as possible prospects or victims. He mustleap from a study of this precious little coterie to the alarming fact that there flourishes in this land of freedom several million free souls who live, move ‘and have their being after the manner of Harold Bell Wright. He must take and make note of Harold in the same breath that heisappalled by the fact that some thirty million Americansexist almost exclusively upon a daily diet of Arthur Brisbane. He dare not ignore Abie’s Irish Rose any more than he ¢an cvade Spengler or Ludwig or Watson or Van Loon or Wyndham Lewis. * * * HE 15 0R SHOULD BE the great interpreter of all sorts and conditions of men. The novelist, after a fashion, knows his audience and can write at it, or for it. He has his own little world, but the advertiser must everlastingly remind himself that the world is not éncompassed in the pages of the New Yorker or the Saturday Evening Post. He fronts his fearsome audience for a few moments only and with a beggarly array of words must not only captivate their imagination but successfully raid their pocketbooks. : He is dealing not with one person but with one person multiplied by at least oné hundred million. He must first study in the abstract man and all of his natural automatic, epileptic responses and reac- tions, Then he must study mankind in the mass which at first glance looks very like a maze. He must bé conscious of Mencken and equally con- scious of all those whom Mencken for a very practical editorial purpose pretends to hate. He must adjudicaté Mencken as a very charming - common scold who has no remedy for the amisble ~ weaknesses of which he complains. He must steadfastly confront the unplessant fact that some millions admire Billy Sunday while other millions think they discern a great man in a great business man called Henry Ford. */ It is useless for him to attempt to do battle with these facts for the very excellent reason that they are facts and — his swift and only stock-in-trade. His not to question why; his but to do them and die. Where he does err is in mistaking the froth for the substance, the ephemeral for the real, the pasing impulse for the permanent. There is lovableness and loveliness in the mass even though its surface seems to be smeared with the ugliness of the mob. There is a key to the abiding and enduring reac- tions of this monster known as the public when that monster is in the mood to buy—which is thé mood of every day and almost every hour. This precious key is not the jazz appeal in adver- tising. Jazz ages die but people in the mass live on. * * * HowsoEVER 0BSCURELY, people do preserve a re- spect for certain sanctities of conduct, and strange to say they seek most eagerly for these sanctities when they come to buy. No man of any observation has reached the age of forty without seeing 4 score of business tendencies rise to the top of the business maelstrom, sweep everything before them and then sink back into oblivion. Every five or ten years has its styles and fashions in business procedure and public response to new appeals which gradually go by the boards leaving little of value behind them. - The only elements which persist and continue to prevail are the primitive instincts of human natare —theage-old attitude of the buyer toward the seller