PAGE SIX
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
SUNDAY, MARCH 18, 1928
Advertising Needs Time to Develop Opportunities
Give Advertising Time: That is the thing it needs most.
The advertising agency is the precocious infant among the professions. One of the oldest agencies in New York prints on its letterhead the date of its founding, and that date is 1869! Think of it-almost ten years after the Civil War and the boys of the Civil War are still alive among us.
Law traces its ideals and traditions back to Moses; but even Law is not free from missteps. The physician takes his Hippocratic oaths. and Hippocrates lived 400 B.C.
Yet it was only yesterday when doctors discovered that bad teeth can cause anything serious. Is it fair to expect perfection in a profession that counts only a single generation to its credit? Should it occasion surprise when even a well laid advertising campaign goes wrong? Is it any wonder that workers whose chief raw material is human nature should have to confess that they cannot always tell in advance just how that raw material will act? But we are learning.
Do you remember the references in English novels to those old law firms-solicitors-in which sons have succeeded their fathers to the third and fourth generation? Each new generation of lawyers has handled the affairs of the new generation among its clients, dealing out counsel based on records which run back for a hundred years or more. There is no reason why advertising agencies, too should not outlive their founders and the successors of their founders, growing wiser with each generation and gathering a priceless possession of recorded experience.
Think of an advertising agency in 2020 being able to turn back in the records to 1927 and say to its clients: "In the Fall of 1927 this happened in silk, and this happened in leather and this happened in wheat, and the selling problems which followed were so and so. The present situation has certain aspects that are similar; and the recommendations which we are presenting are based on a recognition of that fact."
We are gaining experience; we are growing more and more valuable as advisers every year.
Don't expect the impossible - Give advertising time-