Advertising Looks Ahead

Abstract

I want to say just this about them. There is a decided trend towards co6perative and joint effort in (advertising) research. Advertisers agencies and media combine to make it successful. This is a fortunate development. It furnishes a broader point of view and gives to findings an authority they might not otherwise possess. There are three major factors in control of what may happen to us, in my opinion. Changes in business sentiment, in methods of distribution, and in consumer response. A new trend in business seems to be at work today, towards fair play and a more equal opportunity in the competitive struggle. There is also a trend towards a simpler and less cumbersome scheme of distribution, to lower its cost. And, thirdly, the consumer is awakening as never before to her rights and her power to enforce them. It would be a daring prophet who ventured to foretell what is goinig to happen in the next decade. Think what has happened in the last, socially, morally, financially, politically. The only way we can tell anything about the future is to project present trends; where do they seem to lead? As far as business itself is concerned, there seems to be emerging a new working principle which is bound to have a telling effect upon advertising, and that is fair play to the average man and equal opportunity in the competitive struggle. Unfair discrimination seems to be on its way out, with all of the discriminatory prices, rates, discounts and allowances with which we have be n so long familiar. The depression undermined much that we had thought was as solid as a rock. Seven lean and desperate years put all tradition to the test; billions of property lost; millions of people without jobs. Such a collapse could not occur without business itself being put to a drastic test. Our ideas about doing business have been challenged and are being weighed in the light of a new point of view as to what is economically sound. This is being reflected in legislation, both State and Federal. Such measures as the Patman law, the Food & Drugs Bill, the Anti-Basing Point Bill, all point to what lies ahead. The average man, whether he be producer or consumer, retailer or worker, must be reckoned with as never before. This is not merely a political issue. It is too deep for politics. Mr. Roosevelt may be the champion of that movement; he is not the originator of it. It is one of those brewing sentiments in the public mind which requires a great war or widespread distress to crystallize, and we have been through both. I hold no brief for the new deal as such, but I believe it would be a dangerous mistake for business leadership not to recognize the under-current of the recent elec'A paper presented at the Annual Convention of the American Marketing Society, Nov. 27, 1936.