ADVERTISING AND THE PUBLIC

"Advertising," writes H. A. Batten in the current Atlantic Monthly, "has fallen on evil days." Nobody will dispute his statement. The front page of the issue in which the London Times described the victory at Trafalgar was covered with advertisements, modest and factual. The modern newspaper and periodical is plastered with notices which appeal primarily to the emotions. We are asked to discard our reasoning faculties and buy a certain mattress because a certain society leader allowed one to be photographed in her house; to buy a certain cigarette because a movie actress finds its advertisements a convenient vehicle for her publicity; to buy a new car because the paint job resembles in color design the wings of the peacock or the inner gleam of the emerald; or to seek the "taste" of a certain cigarette because "in the ring it's punch"; we are asked to believe that social success and domestic happiness depend primarily on ability to play the gazook or freedom from halitosis; and the Lucky Strike company now has the effrontery to tell the American people that inhalation of their weed is free from the harmful effects present in all other cases. Some advertisers seem to feel that they can indeed fool and insult all of the people all of the time.

Fortunately, there are signs that they cannot. "Of Thee I Sing" has effectively satirized, in Wintergreen's plank of Love, the attempt to convince by appeal to the emotions with neglect of the discriminating intelligence. The Consumer's Research Bulletin is finding wide approval. Mr. Batten has done a service by describing the plight of the advertising man of principle, who must compete with his less ethical collegue, and by placing the responsibility for our charlatan industrial life where it belongs, on the public. When, and only when individual consumers resolve not to buy any article whose advertisers insult his intelligence, will this profession become what it should be, "nothing but the dissemination of the truth."