9. Effect of the campaign on the one is in the limelight, he must live up to the reputa tion created for him, or expect failure more quickly than if he remained in the shadow. Advertising creates popularity for worthy products only. Ad vertising will only accelerate the failure of an un worthy product. As soon as a manufacturer puts his name on his product, he feels an added personal re sponsibility for its quality. Trade-marking and ad vertising have, perhaps, done more to improve the quality of merchandise than any other influence, not excepting pure food laws and factory regulations.
Mr. Myron McMillan of the J. T. McMillan Com pany, packers, recalls a case in point. When he first began to advertise Paragon Bacon, he chose street car cards as a medium so that he might be able to show slices of bacon in the actual colors. He em ployed a noted artist to paint a picture of his bacon. The proper portion of fat and lean strips made every one's mouth water. The card had been in the street car but a few days, when, on talking with his superin tendent, Mr. McMillan learned that his product did not look like the picture on the street-car card. The superintendent said: "Nobody cuts bacon that way." Mr. McMillan replied: "I advertised this bacon be cause I thought it was the finest bacon that could be made. Here I find in my own packing house a man who knew how to improve the quality and had not told me of it. The cards are in the street cars, and we must deliver the quality represented. I don't care what it costs ; as long as we are advertising this bacon cut to waste, if necessary, but give us the cut represented in the pictures." The new cutting was so popular that it has never been changed to this day, and the J. T. McMillan Company finds the pub lic is perfectly willing to pay the additional price which allows the packer to cut to waste in order to present the perfect slice.
When the product is once advertised, the wise manufacturer realizes that it must always be kept up to standard and that his success depends on keeping up the quality rather than on taking advantage of a reputation made thru advertising. Improvement in quality gives talking points for advertisements. There is no question that the automobile was brought to perfection more rapidly thru the yearly seeking of manufacturers for new talking points for their advertisements than it would have been if the auto mobile had not been advertised.
10. The campaign as a great educator.—Advertis ing campaigns have educated the world to the use of the automobile. In twenty years persistent, care fully planned advertising has educated the nation to the use of porcelain bath tubs. Advertising cam paigns have explained the uses of new inventions, have described new discoveries, have pictured new methods. In a story entitled: "A World Without Advertising," prepared for the Associated Advertis ing Clubs of the World, Mr. Forrest Crissey makes the following interesting prophecy: All these calamities involved in A World Without Ad vertising are small and scarcely to be considered when com pared with the blow that would be dealt to education by such a holocaust of elimination. Aside from the common school system of the United States advertising is undoubtedly the greatest educational force in existence. Perhaps even this exception is debatable but advertising has no need to claim more than its own in any field and it can do and will gladly do for the common schools for formal education far more than it has ever been asked or permitted to do.
There is in man an impulse for larger living that is the very seed of progress. The individual, the community, the nation in which this impulse is undeveloped, faces certain stagnation. Nothing else stimulates this natural hunger for an expanding experience in every rightful direction as does advertising. Always it prompts man to move forward, to want more things, better things, finer things. It is the official advance agent of Invention, of Science, of Art and of Education.
11. Advertising and selling expense.—In the Text on "Marketing Methods" a chapter is devoted to the consideration of the effect of advertising on the selling price of the thing advertised. This is so important a subject, and one which so vitally concerns the future of advertising and the attitude of the public toward all publicity, that it is well here to give additional illustrations of the influence of advertising on prices and to review the arguments which definitely justify advertising as a legitimate, economical, and generally beneficial method of marketing.