1995 Passage1
Money spent on advertising is money spent as well as any I know of.
It serves directly to assist a rapid distribution of goods at reasonable price,
thereby establishing a firm home market and so making it possible to provide for export at competitive prices.
By drawing attention to new ideas it helps enormously to raise standards of living.
By helping to increase demand it ensures an increased need for labour,
and is therefore an effective way to fight unemployment.
It lowers the costs of many services:
without advertisements your daily newspaper would cost four times as much,
the price of your television licence would need to be doubled,
and travel by bus or tube would cost 20 per cent more.
And perhaps most important of all,
advertising provides a guarantee of reasonable value in the products and services you buy.
Apart from the fact that twenty-seven acts of Parliament govern the terms of advertising,
no regular advertiser dare promote a product that fails to live up to the promise of his advertisements.
He might fool some people for a little while through misleading advertising.
He will not do so for long,
for mercifully the public has the good sense not to buy the inferior article more than once.
If you see an article consistently advertised,
it is the surest proof I know that the article does what is claimed for it, and that it represents good value.
Advertising does more for the material benefit of the community than any other force I can think of.
There is one more point I feel I ought to touch on.
Recently I heard a well-known television personality declare that he was against advertising
because it persuades rather than informs.
He was drawing excessively fine distinctions.
Of course advertising seeks to persuade.
If its message were confined merely to information
--and that in itself would be difficult
if not impossible to achieve,for even a detail such as the choice of the colour of a shirt is subtly persuasive
--advertising would be so boring that no one would pay any attention.
But perhaps that is what the well-known television personality wants.
