ADVERTISING MEDIUMS 1. Place of the medium in the campaign.—We have discussed the demand for the product, the possible market, the competition and the men who conduct the advertising campaign. Our next question is : How may the advertisements be brought before the public? What instrument or instruments are we to use to send our advertising message to the greatest number of potential customers? In advertising, as in war, the men who direct the forces are constantly confronted by the problem of choosing the best means of carrying on the adver tising campaign. What mediums are to be .used? For any given product, designed to reach a given class of people, what means can best serve the ad vertiser in carrying his message to the people he wants to reach—magazines, newspapers, street cars, circu lar letters, catalogs, sampling, house organs, painted signs, electrical displays, demonstrations and so on to the end of a long list ? We are to find that there are three main divisions of mediums, just as there are three main divisions of the forces available for mili tary warfare, and that these three divisions divide and subdivide into so many groups that the problem of selecting the right mediums is as difficult as it is im portant.
2. One medium alone seldom, war few campaigns have succeeded by the use of one branch of the service alone. Napoleon placed too much confidence in his artillery, and this is said to have been one of the causes of his fall at Waterloo. So in advertising, few successes are attributable to the use of only one class of mediums. Campbell's Soups were first advertised in the street-cars, and for a long time this was the only class of advertising the company used. Today, however, this great adver tiser is depending on magazine advertising for the greater proportion of its success, and it is also using newspaper advertising in many localities.
The choice of the mediums to be used is one of the most important problems of any advertising cam paign.
3. Advertising mediums advertising medium, in its broadest sense, is any vehicle which carries an advertising message, suggestion or im pression. Everyone in business at some time in his
career has had someone try to sell him something on the ground that "It will be a good 'ad' for you." The doctor and the lawyer, who are usually left alone by the advertising solicitor, are persuaded to buy ex pensive automobiles, fine homes and memberships in clubs on the pretext of advertising. The politician buys space in the program which the ladies the church are going to use at their next fair. And the business man—well, the business man often finds an assortment of advertising solicitors lined up in front of his office when he arrives at work in the morning, and another equally formidable array and with equally plausible propositions awaiting him on his re turn from luncheon.
Mr. M. W. Savage of the International Stock Food Company, owned Dan Patch, Minor Heir and other famous horses. The name of Dan Patch was insepa rable from the International Stock Food Company, and wherever he appeared, he was an advertisement for his owner and his owner's business.
4. How mediums are selected.—At the outset of a study of mediums the advertiser should clearly under stand that all 'mediums are good. They are not all good for all purposes or for all advertisers, but each one for some particular purpose and in some par ticular way can perform a useful service for some ad vertiser. There are many rival claims of superiority among the people who try to induce advertisers to use different classes of mediums. Some magazine men try to convince advertisers that magazines as a class are better mediums than newspapers, and then the newspaper publishers set up counter claims of su periority for their publications. Billboards are said to be better than street-car cards, and street-car cards are said to be better than billboards. And so the fruitless controversy goes on respecting all kinds of mediums. Such discussion is as futile as to debate the relative value to man of air and water.