the influence and techniques of modern advertising

THE INFLUENCE AND TECHNIQUES OF MODERN ADVERTISINGAuthor(s): JOHN HOBSONSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 112, No. 5096 (JULY 1964), pp. 565-604Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41369404 .

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THE INFLUENCE AND

TECHNIQUES OF MODERN

ADVERTISING

Three Cantor Lectures

by

JOHN HOB SON, M.A., F.I.P.A. ,

Chairman , Hobson , Bates and Partners Ltd.

I. THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT OF ADVERTISING

delivered to the Society on Monday 2nd March 1964, with Hector McNeil , B.E., Chairman , Messrs . Babcock and Wilcox Ltd., and a Member of Council

of the Society , in the Chair

the chairman: Mr. Hobson was senior classical exhibitioner at Rugby School, and subsequently gained a double first in classics at King's College, Cambridge. He also played in the college rugby and tennis teams. In my view this is an ideal back- ground for a person who was destined also to play one of the most distinguished parts in British advertising to-day. In a recent article in The Observer he was described as probably the leading expert on marketing in Great Britain. His company, which is no doubt well known to you - Hobson, Bates and Partners - is a result of a merger with Bates of New York, and that enables it to draw on a very wide experience not only in this country but also in the U.S.A.

The following lecture was then delivered.

I am delighted that the Royal Society of Arts have thought fit to make Advertising the subject of these three Cantor Lectures. Not only is advertising one of the most notable areas where the arts, industry and commerce meet. It is also the outward and visible sign of one of the most important social phenomena of the mid- twentieth century in this country - backstreet abundance, the percolation to the mass level of a substantial purchasing power. Certainly advertising would not exist without that mass purchasing power ; but I venture to assert, too, that backstreet abundance would not exist without advertising.

I am the Chairman of an Advertising Agency; so you will not expect me to be other than biased in favour of my occupation. I am fascinated by its creativity; its techniques; its vast range of human, social and industrial interest. But I can see that it is open to some question and even some criticism, and I shall try to put a fair and honest appraisal of the subject in front of you. I am going to confine my remarks largely to mass consumer goods advertising. The £225 million of mass

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 consumer advertising is the area in which discussion is most needed and most challenging.

Lastly by way of preamble, I must remind you that inevitably I am speaking in the context of the society and the economics that exist to-day in Britain ; where an individual is rightly accorded a measure of free will and free choice, some opportunity to be right or wrong in his own decision; where there is free competition and a drive for profits. If you prefer an authoritarian society and economy, in which some authority decides for everyone what his tastes should be, what is best for him, what profits he should make, and what the limits of his objectives should be, then you alter the terms of reference and you would not necessarily want advertising in exactly its present shape; you might not even want it at all, though I rather doubt the latter.

Before I launch into my main topics, I need to clear away two common con- fusions about advertising. First, advertising is not (as some people seem to imagine) something in its own right, some separate estate of the realm, like civil administration, or the Services, or law. Advertising is an integral and essential part of industry - its projection into the vital department of selling. This misconception is so widespread that, at the Labour Party Conference last autumn, one delegate could talk of 'curtailing the power of the Advertising Industry'. He should rather have said, 'curtailing the power of industry to sell its products'.

There are indeed advertising specialists serving industry just as there are engineers serving ships. But their sailing orders come from the bridge, and on the bridge are the captains of industry. Advertising reflects industry's intentions and will, its strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, it does more than reflect them - it projects them on to the biggest screen possible. For the most part British industry's intentions are honest, honourable and fair. Most manufacturers believe implicitly that they have succeeded in making products that are better than competitive ones in properties, performance or value. They may sometimes be mistaken, but their belief is honest. This confidence they translate into their advertising, and their advertising technicians are advocates of that confidence. When, however, competition drives or sheer survival demands, industry will signal from the bridge to the engine-room to increase the power, quicken the pace, or change the direction, and advertising is in no position to refuse.

The second misconception I want to clear away is about the true function of advertising. Advertising is selling. Nicholas Kaldor in an important article in the Journal of Economic Studies some years ago attempted an interesting appraisal of advertising; but since he started with the wrong premise that the function of advertising is to inform, he produced some notably erroneous conclusions. The object of advertising is not basically to inform, but to inform for the purpose of selling. The information given will be that which is calculated to help the proposition. No one is going to pay large sums of money to give information which hinders his proposition. Often the amount of information is valid ; sometimes it is minimal because there is no new information to give. Advertising neither is nor can be a dis- interested service of consumer information. It is salesmanship on a mass scale and it is well to start this discussion with all the cards face upwards on the table.

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JULY 1964 THE INFLUENCE AND TECHNIQUES OF MODERN ADVERTISING

That advertising is a vital part of modern economics is proved by the fact that it exists and thrives in every country where the economics of abundance apply. You cannot have production without consumption. It is absurd to have a National Productivity Year and official NED С targets of production increase, without the means of stimulating consumption. Or are we to be for ever bedevilled by that typical British fetish that production is

4 gooď but consumption is 'baďi We live

in a society in which the mass of the people already have more than a sufficiency of necessities, and where the extra consumption must take the form of optional benefits ranging from necessary extras to sheer luxuries. The old models of the classical economists are out of date: the models which assume a certain level of demand for bushels of wheat or tons of coal, and play around with supply and price variables. In the context of consumer buying, such cosy, arithmetical factors as price- elasticity in a market are of far less importance than the elusive subjective factors of intensity of want. This always baffles and irritates the old-fashioned economists. An automatic demand does not exist for the types of extra production now coming forward; it has to be created.

Professor Galbraith in The Affluent Society pointed out that the economic objectives of the last century have been the increase of production. He believes they should be changed, but for the moment they are so; and while they are so, production has got to find a complementary consumption. We must create an acquisitive society if this extra production is not to pile up in the warehouses.

In a recent speech Lord Robens referred to the NED С target of a 4 per cent increase in production. After eliminating the increase correlated with growth of population and of exports, he pointed out that we shall need each year a 2.8 per cent increase of domestic consumer production - compared with a 2.1 per cent growth in recent years. This represents an annual increase of £500 million in domestic consumption and it is an accepted Government target. He added that it cannot be achieved without the power of advertising to stimulate consumption. 'Industry', he said, 'must not have one hand tied behind its back.'

There may be other ways of disposing of increased production, such as giving it to backward countries, but the present state of public opinion and domestic politics admits only of marginal disposals in this way. The rest must be consumed by the home consumer, and the consumer must like consuming it. It is the job of advertising and salesmanship on behalf of industry to make the consumer want to consume more. Or is this necessary consumption to be a frigid, joyless process without preliminary wooing?

This brings me to the service which advertising performs for the industry which pays for it. Let us be clear that industry does not spend £225 million each year on advertising in order to see its name in the papers. It does so because advertising performs an indispensable service for it. It assures to the manufacturer the mass consumption necessary to match his mass production. That mass production involves high initial and investment risks, and much of this risk could never be undertaken without the assurance of mass consumption.

However, the process does not merely assure a total demand; advertising can help to stabilize demand. It helps to assure the stability and rhythm of the type of

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 mass distribution needed. It can do much to even out seasonal fluctuations of demand. It can smooth out the turmoil of events which result from dynamic competitive innovations. It can offer the opportunity to exploit new inventions and improvements. It can result in a quicker build up of demand which reduces the pay-off period of new machinery, new buildings, research investment. The assurance of steady demand justifies longer-term contracts for raw materials, and this increases stability and reduces costs all down the line right to the raw material producers.

The growth of quantity production, through constantly improving production techniques, and assisted by the confidence in demand created by advertising, is now in its turn the true cause of backstreet abundance, as I have called it. Mass production reduces the real cost of goods and makes them more and more widely available. The price which has to be paid for mass production is some degree of standardization of products, but it is a small price to suffer for a process which brings more and more utilities, pleasures and recreations within the purchasing power of the mass of the population. The rise in the mass standard of living, the competitiveness of industry which results in better and better products coming forward each year, and the stabilization of full employment, these are the fruits of mass production assisted by mass salesmanship which is advertising. Poverty, maybe, still exists here and there, but it is a relative word. Sufficiency and abundance are seen everywhere.

In this context may I touch on the cost of advertising. Advertising is one of the selling costs of a product, like packaging or running a sales force or paying a retail margin. In this sense the public pays for the advertising, as indeed it pays for the costs of ingredients, or the production costs, or the other costs of selling com- prised in the ultimate buying price.

But in a much more real sense advertising helps to lower prices: because mass production assuredly lowers unit costs and advertising is indispensable, in a free economy, to mass production. Like the installation of a wonderful new very efficient production machine (which no one would query in principle), advertising pays for itself , and more, out of the savings in the unit cost through quantity production. If advertising ceased to exist, most consumer goods would in the long run, or most likely the short run, go up in price.

The main criticism of advertising in its economic aspects, I think, is that there is more of it than is needed to fulfil the economic and industrial function required of it. Much has been made of an old, old saying of Lord Leverhulme about 'half my advertising is wasted but I do not know which half'. There is thought to be wasteful competition. There is a general imputation of slap-dash spending of very large sums of money. This leads to suggestions of restriction and even of taxation.

The figures show that, expressed as a percentage of the Gross National Product, expenditure on advertising is at just about the same level now as it was in 1938. Of course, just after the war the percentage was lower, but at that time the need to stimulate consumption was not so great. The stability of this percentage in pre- war and recent post-war years suggests that as far as the British market is concerned the process has found its level and is unlikely to increase or decrease much.

Modern methods of assessing results from advertising are far more efficient than

568




those of the pre-war or early post-war period. They are not yet perfect but they are improving every year; Lord Leverhulme's saying is no longer true in any major degree. The industrialists who spend large sums on advertising are no fools.

The idea that competitive advertising of brands in the same market is wasteful, is not true in practice. Although it might seem to an outsider that they are merely spending to take business away from each other, this is not in fact what happens. What happens is that their joint spending widens the total market for the product group and both advertisers are well repaid for their efforts. I have seen it happen over and over again.

Of course, there are times when new products are launched ill- advisedly, or extra spending is put into existing products unsuccessfully. There are the occasions when excessive or stubborn optimism overrules good judgement and when, to put it plainly, the manufacturers make a mistake. But unless one envisages a government bureau to decide what shall be sold, and who shall be allowed to progress, and what new initiatives may be undertaken, such misjudgements are unavoidable. They are a normal price of progress.

A restriction or tax on advertising must be a restriction or tax on initiative and on development. If we need more consumption then we must not inhibit the initiatives or the investment in securing it. The industrialists may surely be left to decide for themselves what initiatives and what volume of activity are compatible with running a sound business.

To return to my main theme. Increased production presupposes increased consumption. But increased consumption cannot be achieved merely by making an increase of goods available. It can only be achieved by making the products wanted . This raises the question of salesmanship, which, on a mass scale, is what advertising is. Incidentally, advertising is accused of creating wants. This is not a true picture: advertising evokes and activates latent wants, which people never realized they had the means of satisfying. The failures of marketing almost always reside in the failure to assess rightly whether a true want exists. You cannot create a want which does not exist.

The economic phenomenon of abundance at mass level has a natural comple- ment in what historians will, I think, recognize as one of the social phenomena of the century - the rise in importance of salesmanship. In the eyes of a limited intellectual and upper class minority - but I suspect this audience will include such people in a substantial majority - salesmanship is not quite respectable. In the eyes of the great majority of the public it presents very little problem. On the whole, you know, people enjoy being sold things.

In 'salesmanship' I comprise two separate elements. First, the whole complex of activities by which a cornucopia of goods and services and pleasures is spilled out in front of the mass consumer; by which his every next want is assessed and provided for ; and of which advertising is the most obvious and ubiquitous outward and visible sign. The consumer is king; his wants are law; and a whole host of specialists is studying how best to cater to them. The impetus of the development derives from two forces that cannot be resisted : the new mass spending power and the democratic expectation of being allowed to exercise choice and free will.

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964

Second, the techniques of salesmanship. These are of course the more tangible of the two elements, and they are therefore used as the main target.

A powerful new force such as salesmanship naturally meets fierce resistance from those elements in society whose existing power it is diminishing. We have seen the same resistance to * trade' as an occupation as late as at the turn of the century. But the clock cannot be turned back and there is ample evidence that the new generations in the Establishment, in industry and in commerce are recognizing and accepting the new force.

However, the rearguard of conservative social forces have one relatively easy target. Advertising magnifies each day on to a huge projection the difference between the accepted ethics of everyday life and the true philosophical or religious ethics to which each of us in our best moments aspires. For example, by its nature advertising deals in partial truths, not in whole truths. It claims the favourable aspects of the truth about the product it sells, and is silent about the less favourable. It is content if what it says is true for some people on some occasions, even if it cannot be universally true. In short it behaves as ordinary people behave, and I think you would have to be very self-righteous to blame it for that.

The law in its ancient wisdom has accepted that this is permissible in selling, and it is recognized as common practice and common sense. Indeed, the simple words and images comprehensible to the mass market could not possibly comprise the universal truth. Moreover, selling is accepted behaviour in a vast range of other contexts : selling political or social ideas ; selling projects across a Committee table ; selling one's own personality in every phase of personal relations; and so on. Selling is as old as human relations and it has been accepted as common practice. The advocacy of ideas, it seems, is applauded; but the selling of goods is rejected. Yet good goods are as valuable as good ideas; and, assuredly, bad ideas are far more dangerous than bad goods.

The real problem is that what is accepted common practice in private, or on a small scale, can easily be subjected to criticism when shown up in the limelight of mass proportions.

What is vital therefore is that the beneficial power of this new force of mass salesmanship should neither attract fair criticism nor overstep acceptable limits by being allowed to become misleading or irresponsible. In its earlier phases advertising was often irresponsible and occasionally it still is. The best safeguard lies in the attitude of the industry that sponsors it and the people who practise it. The licence of salesmanship must not be allowed to develop into licentiousness.

What then are the reasonable safeguards that the community must have to channel this dynamic into its most beneficial direction? There is a strong movement nowadays in the name of 'consumer protection'. This movement says, 'If the powerful voice of advertising is merely representing the favourable aspects of its products, should not the public have the right to full and precise information on the pros and cons of these products alongside the advertising claims?' The theory is fine; the practice is virtually unworkable. The average public would far rather invest a few shillings to find out whether a product lives up to its claim than read some elaborate objective evaluation. Nor do people really trust the rounded-off 'best

570




buy' pronouncement of some remote, unseen authority. Their own experiences, or the say-so of friends or relations, are far more convincing. The great majority of consumers would not use this kind of protection, if it were provided.

In my judgement and experience there are three great safeguards of the buyer in relation to salesmanship through advertising.

The first is that (unlike the salesman at the door, for example) the advertiser depends on repeat selling, not on a single sale. If his propositions are extravagant or misleading, and his product on its first purchase fails to live up to the promises in its advertising, he will suffer a serious loss.

The second is that people who see and hear advertisements are well aware that they are being sold something, and they discount a large measure of what is said. Talk to them and they will say T never believe what the adverts tell me'. By this they mean they mentally prefix to the reading of each advertisement the thought 'the advertiser says . . . '. They distil out of it instinctively as much as they can believe might be true for them personally. Some people worry that children may be over-credulous on exposure to good advertising. This is possible. It is a worry best met, as one of my colleagues said in a speech recently, by teaching children to put that mental prefix to each advertisement 'the advertiser says . . . '.

The third safeguard lies in all that has been done during the last sixty years to prevent misleading claims from irresponsible advertisers. Not only have industry and its advertising technicians adopted higher standards, but there has been legislation like the Merchandise Marks Act. However, legislation itself is not the right answer - it can never be watertight. Recently the sections of industry and commerce concerned with advertising have consolidated into a single code, 'the British Code of Advertising Practice', the various existing rules governing advertising claims, and have adopted - with the agreement of the principal media - the sanction that advertisements which offend these standards are debarred from publication. The governing body is called the Advertising Standards Authority, formed half from advertising and half from non- advertising interests, with an independent Chairman. The executive body is called the Code of Advertising Practice Committee, which sets up the codes and deals with the cases arising under them. Then there is the Advertisement Investigation Department of the Advertising Association which investigates the validity of claims, and there are experts available on most subjects to advise on the facts. It is a system which is as watertight as it can be. It may not prevent some fly-by-night advertiser from offering spurious wares in some obscure local medium but it will go a long way to preventing serious abuses. Let me only add that, although this new and elaborate machinery has only recently been established, the responsible media have for years done their utmost to check on advertisement claims, especially on television, which is a special case because of the provisions of the Television Act. For the most part those checks have been successful in eliminating false claims; but the system will now be tighter.

My own appraisal therefore of this whole issue is that the balance of strength between the drive of the seller for more sales, and the natural caution and resistance of the buyer (which is in fact the current balance, and which has grown up in a

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 free society over many centuries), is still the best system, and cannot be replaced by externally imposed limitations on either the buyer or the seller. In this balance of strength, salesmanship and advertising, which is mass salesmanship, play their part on behalf of the seller ; and caution, inertia and habit as well as judgement, play their part for the buyer. No one should ever underrate the capacity of the British public to divine and assess the true values of what is offered. It is erroneous as well as patronizing to think it can easily be fooled. The public is very adult and can be treated as such. This is not to say that within this pattern there is not a case for every reasonable limitation on unfair selling and every possible protection for incautious or ignorant buying - and these precautions are being more and more devised by all concerned in the business. But we know this pattern works ; all the alternatives are untried.

There are other arguments brought against advertising in its social context: that the whole overwhelming pressure of expert communication to sell things is tending to create a materialistic outlook and an 'acquisitive society'; and secondly, that it debases taste.

To the first of these propositions I must reply 'Yes, the effect of advertising volume is to concentrate people's minds on the pleasures of acquiring, owning, enjoying materialistic benefits.'

We are dealing with a subject which is very much a matter of point of view. Our politics, our economics, our whole basic drive, whether from industry or the trade unions, from the City or from the Labour Party, has been to raise the material well-being of the masses of the population. Who is to say that it is right to ensure that people have a sufficiency of bread and meat, but wrong that they have a variety of attractive foods to choose from? That it is right for women to be released from drudgery, but wrong for the process to go as far as offering them washing machines, mixers, frozen peas or gay curtain material? That we should all have holidays with pay but not to be tempted to take those holidays abroad? And so on?

Let us remember all the time that all the needs of production-orientated economics, all the maintenance of full employment, all the progressive discoveries of modern science, and all the drives of past history, have tended to focus on material betterment for people and nations.

The ascetic, the puritan, the idealist may have other views, but I suspect that very often they are essentially egotistic views proceeding from a personal dislike of posses- sions. They positively dislike and fear abundance, particularly backstreet abundance. I respect these as personal attitudes. But I do not think that they are compatible with the daily activities of 99 per cent of our population who, in the backstreets or the suburbs, are involved in a struggle for material livelihoods and comforts.

Moreover the achievement of a better materialistic standard of living, the struggle out of the slum outlook, in which the drive for self-betterment fostered by advertising plays so great a part, can be the finest foundation for further wow- materialistic aspirations. In any case we cannot put the economic clock back, to satisfy the ascetics. Modern economics are the economics of abundance, in which the demand for, and the acquisition and consumption of, goods are an indispensable counterpart of more and more efficient and plentiful production.

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JULY I964 THE INFLUENCE AND TECHNIQUES OF MODERN ADVERTISING

The second proposition, that advertising lowers literary usage and standards of taste, and produces debased images and motivations, is to my mind an absurd generalization (though there may be a few cases which can be truly cited). It is of course a view heard from a limited minority, and it proceeds from an intellectual and social snobbery resulting from a complete lack of contact between those people and the vast majority of their fellow countrymen. An eminent leader of public opinion, highly regarded in Government circles, and the Chairman of a number of Royal and other Commissions said to me recently that he approved of the advertising found in The Times , but totally disapproved on literary grounds of certain popular advertising found in the Daily Mirror and elsewhere. Now what kind of human understanding does that remark reveal? The job of advertising is to communicate with the potential market. If we talk to Times readers we talk in Times language; but if we want to talk to the Daily Mirror readers we might almost as well talk in Russian as talk in Times language. To communicate with the people we have to accept and to use their vocabulary, their motives and interests, their ideas of fun, their standard of visual images, just as their favourite newspapers do, or their favourite television programmes.

We hear criticisms that the trivialities of advertising smother the means of important communication. It is true that advertising deals mainly with trivialities - the choice between two beers or two toothpastes must rest on trivialities. But if those who thought they had something important to say to the people would only come down off their pontifical high horses and their classical educations, and use the idioms and images of the people - like negro spirituals or Churchill's speeches - they would, I feel sure, find that they were getting the attention they expect.

In its language and its visual images, in the motives or the aspirations it evidences, advertising reflects without flattery the values of the society we live in. Advertising that hypocritically assumed that tastes and motives were higher than they are, would simply fail to do its primary job. Nor is it the province of advertising to educate or uplift; that is for the educators and the preachers. Advertising is the mirror of our society and if the face we see in the mirror is, on occasion, more ugly or illiterate than we hoped, it is no good solving the problem by breaking the mirror.

Now I do not mean to disparage fine ideals and high standards; and I certainly do not underrate the basic problem which lies in the fact that a great and powerful system of communication, with all its capacity for social good or evil, is motivated and governed by industry seeking its own economic ends. This is indeed a paradox which needs deep reflection. But society must expect, and on the whole does find, that its industrialists have a sense of the responsibility this power entails. Society must build up countervailing forces to promote the interests of non-materialistic well-being, because we all of us know that there are vital factors of well-being that lie outside the materialistic areas. But I say that advertising itself cannot be expected to be schizophrenic; it has its job to do, and it must do it, and it is a job of great value to the community.

I recall one incident which seems to me to crystallize the whole essence of the problem of advertising's social context. A well-known and highly respected

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Quaker industrialist once said to me, as he approved his vast advertising budgets, 'advertising is a necessary evil'. To him as an industrialist advertising was essential; to him as a Quaker it was an evil. Which is the greater good: the prosperity of an industry which ensures the livelihood of thousands of families and meets the legitimate needs of millions - or the very real and honourable convictions of Quaker asceticism?

These words crystallize the paradox of modern advertising. On the one hand we have a system which is indispensable to the health of our consumer industries, to the abundance of our people's standard of living, to the life-or-death struggle for exports in a competitive world. On the other hand we have the creation of a materialistic society, the question of the partial truths of salesmanship, the risks involved in putting a vast social power into the hands of industry seeking its economic salvation.

The solution to a paradox must, I think, be compromise. Salesmanship, and in particular public salesmanship in the form of advertising, must be allowed pressures. But we must demand responsible salesmanship, highly self-critical, conscious exactly of the line of truth and good manners that it must not overstep. This is not a problem for the law or the Government ; such matters cannot be handled by written law. It is the job of industry that pays for advertising and governs it, of the technicians who practise it, and of the pressure of public opinion, to exercise the necessary restraint. The minority view of asceticism, the Puritan strain in our make-up, the eyebrow-raising of the out-of-touch intellectual, must not over- power and outweigh the majority needs of a better living standard, but neither must they be ignored. We need salesmanship in our society, but it must be responsible salesmanship , and this I believe is what modern industry and modern advertising are striving to give us.

DISCUSSION

MR. A. powis bale, мл. mech. E. : In view of our Chairman's own engineering interests, I thought some mention might have been made of engineering advertising, which is one of the most difficult forms of advertising to undertake. I think, for example, of the enormous difficulty of advertising such a thing as a twist drill. Why is it that there has been so little advance in quality of the best engineering advertising during the last twenty years?

the lecturer: I did not deal with engineering advertising because I thought it really was not controversial in content. It is usually largely a matter of information and minimally of subjective values, and therefore it seemed to me not to be one of the most useful and fruitful fields for discussion. As far as the quality of engineering advertising is concerned, perhaps the Chairman might like to comment.

the chairman : I was going to ask that question myself ! In my experience, the more technically advanced and costly a product is, the less is there any question of selling it by advertising. In this field of advertising the function is, as Mr. Hobson says, to be informative about the product and particularly about the capabilities of the company. The company hopes that this will be uppermost in the mind of the customer

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when the time comes, once in a few years, for him to purchase one of those very large products.

MR. L. в. Seymour, мл. p.a. (The Warren Seymour Co. Ltd.): May I pass on a question that I was asked a few days ago? On this point of competing brands widening the total market, assuming that all petrol brands went off the market and we reverted to pool and super-pool, would people use their cars any less, and would the distributive trades use their commercial vehicles any less?

the lecturer: It is very difficult to answer these negative questions. What you can do is to look at it the other way about. Almost certainly the increase in motoring has been the result of competitive petrol advertising, and I can only assume that given a certain time lapse this would go into reverse. It is almost impossible to quote examples of a reverse operation, but it is quite easy to point to examples of competitive brand advertising increasing markets. Each market consists of a number of shades in a spectrum around the principal one. To take shaving as an example: some people want speed, some want luxury, some want something else, and mostly a brand can get itself identified only with a single shade of preference. Where you get a number of competing brands you bring in a lot of people who are attracted by the other shades, and this, I think, is the way that competitive advertising operates to build up a market. But I have seen it happen over and over again that where you get a new product coming into a market, the total market expands : the new product gets a good sale and the existing products do not lose anything.

MR. A. j. Wilson : It seems to me that a man need only shave once a day and, therefore, at any given time the 'total market' for shaving is constant. Now, since all men want to shave, the market is saturated and satisfied. In these circumstances, the advertising of razor blades seeks to take away business from competitive blades and not to increase the total sold by all the manufacturers.

the lecturer: I agree you cannot now increase the number of an individual's shaves per day, though I suspect there has been an increase in the number of shaves per day over the last fifty years. Formerly, not every man shaved every day, and I am perfectly sure that a very large proportion of the public never shaved more than once a week. Now they may be shaving once a day. But even so, leaving that aspect of the point aside, the total market for shaving products has increased enormously and industries have been built, employment has been increased, on that basis, by people taking to electric shavers, by people taking to quicker, easier, more luxurious forms of shaving. If we really just set out to exist on the one-shave-day-a basis there is nothing much that any of us really wants, except maybe a chair and a loaf of bread. What advertising does is to increase the total of pleasure and utility. It is making more pleasure, more utilities, more luxuries, more ease, more labour-saving available to people, and in that sense I think advertising has increased the total of the shaving market quite considerably.

MR. в. G. w. heard, d.f.c. (Messrs. W. D. & H. O. Wills): There is no room for complacency in any manufacturer's calculations. The market for razor blades and electric shavers is diminishing in this country as we beard wearers increase in numbers, and there is still a job to be done by manufacturers of blades and electric shavers to convince users that they are as comfortable.

MR. c. H. jourdan: In consumer durables the brand name has been built up by advertising, and all advertising has, generally speaking, shown the price of the article. Will the function of advertising have to be changed if price maintenance is abolished?

the lecturer : I don't think so, because I do not believe the primary function of advertising is to announce the price. A price is a useful part of advertising, but a

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great deal of advertising is extremely useful and successful without giving prices. The primary function of advertising is to crystallize a want into a demand, and I don't believe that that is affected by the abolition of retail price maintenance. The abolition of retail price maintenance is likely to create more and more shopping in circumstances where personal attention is not going to be given to the shopper, and therefore the shopper is going to want to know a thing by its name and reputation.

MR. L. j. PRECHNER. B.sc. : A lot of advertising is very useful, and it is blamed unfairly for the sins of others. But I do want to draw the attention to what I call 'S.S. E.G.' - sex, snobbery, fear and greed. The appeals to these instincts in advertising are very much on the increase, and the young are continually bombarded with them.

I wonder whether Mr. Hobson would say whether he is in favour of advertising techniques being introduced into politics? Is it wise to sell politicians as if they were brands of soap?

Another aspect of advertising concerns women especially. The lecturer says the public cannot be fooled. Aren't women fooled by paying goodness knows how much for cosmetics?

Again, Mr. Hobson says it is good because the public gets what it wants, but is the effect of advertising so good on youth? There is a vast working-class market now, and I wonder, for example, whether the huge expenditure by the youth of that class on 'pop' records is the best way in which they can spend their money? These comments are just an attempt to show the other side of the coin from that presented by Mr. Hobson.

the lecturer: This question is at the root of the whole issue, and one which I tried to deal with. There is no doubt that what you are complaining about is the public, not about advertising. So advertising is faced with the problem that it has either got to disregard what the public is and does and feels and thinks and how it looks, or it has got to do as it is doing at the moment. It cannot be schizophrenic; it cannot be on the one hand a preacher, an improver, and on the other hand do its job of selling soap. It may be very undesirable for people to be moved by sex, snobbery, fear and greed, but I think that advertising has to talk to people in terms of their own images, instincts and idioms.

I would set my own face against political advertising simply because I just feel that way, but I cannot see anything wrong in it. In fact I very much hope that the techniques of advertising are going to be applied to a lot of things besides selling consumer goods in the course of the next fifty years. People who have something worth saying are going to learn that if they want to be understood by the mass of the people they have got to talk in the terms that the mass of people understand.

MR. Montague calman : Would the speaker explain how it is that a firm like Marks & Spencer, which sells non-branded goods and as a matter of policy does not advertise nationally, has such a fabulous turnover?

the lecturer: The article by Nicholas Kaldor that I referred to, was very illumina- ting on one particular point. He pointed out that the commercial economy is divided between what he called manufacturer-dominated and retailer-dominated selling situations. In other words, if you buy Bird's custard, that is a manufacturer-dominated situation ; if you shop at Woolworth's, that is a retailer-dominated situation.

These are entirely separate situations. It is perfectly clear how they arrive. A shopper has to have confidence in something first ; she can choose between buying a brand or going to a shop. In a lot of fields like, for example, soft goods, the retailer situation is much stronger than the branded situation ; over a large number of other areas like grocery the manufacturer-dominated situation is much stronger. Obviously the two

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things can get mixed up to some extent. Marks & Spencer's reputation is undoubtedly based on being a shop that people want to shop at. The whole thing about a shop that people want to shop at, is that on the whole if you pass it every day or every week, you don't need an awful lot of advertising to remind you about it. But it is quite a different thing when you come to brands, because you are not necessarily aware of them from week to week or even from month to month unless the advertising makes you so. There is no doubt that Marks & Spencer have done a wonderful job without advertising. Advertising could still help them, but I don't believe it could ever play an important part in their business as it must do in manufacturer-dominated situations.

miss Jennifer marks : I understand that you must appeal to the public in a way that they understand. If the public's favourite colour is blue, then you put blue in your advertisements. But how about influencing people unawares - playing on a mental prefix for something of which they are not conscious because they do not know exactly what their own make-up is?

the lecturer : The Hidden Persuaders ! The meaning of that book has been grossly exaggerated and over-dramatized. What the advertiser wants to do is to appeal to people in the terms of their emotions, aspirations and wants. It is no good appealing to them in other terms, but I cannot see anything sinister in finding out, for example, that people would like to buy a perfume because it gives them a feeling of uplift. On the whole, motivation studies, though they occasionally throw up something new, come up with quite obvious things. There is nothing amiss in advertisers using a particular kind of want as a basis of their advertising. The 'hidden persuader' notion has been blown up like subliminal advertising - of which there never has been any and never will be any, as far as I know. It simply is that someone has taken the trouble to find out what people's attitudes and motives are in the area of the product concerned, but I suspect that any one who is intelligent and intuitive might easily have guessed them without any extensive ferreting around.

MR. D. A. monks, M.i.M.s.M. : Mr. Hobson spoke, I think, against consumer protection organizations. There is mounting evidence that the consumer protection organizations have considerably influenced manufacturers to improve their products and in many instances to remove them from the market altogether. They also enable the buyer to make judgements on products which he is not necessarily able to judge by himself unaided.

the lecturer : I would not want to be misunderstood. I am all in favour of the kind of activity that is going on. I do believe that it can affect the manufacturer. The British Standards Institution ought to be able to do the same thing, but it did not succeed until the whole trend of public opinion was informed. The point I was making was that I don't believe the information provided by such organizations will have a direct impact on the public as a whole. I don't believe they will want to read it or would understand it if they did. I believe they would rather spend one and fourpence to find out for themselves.

MR. peter DRUMMOND-MURRAY : We can differentiate between advice about low- priced goods, such as the notorious article on beer, and something very important to us all, like buying a car. When it is done by a special magazine or an ordinary motoring correspondent, we do pay a great deal of attention to this kind of research ; the more of it the more valuable it is, because we cannot afford to make mistakes in buying expensive durables.

the lecturer: I agree, but I don't think research of the kind that the earlier questioner mentioned is exactly the kind of research that goes into helping to formulate

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 the features of a car. To some extent I am sure it must help, but advertising does not seem to me to play a very important part in the buying of a car.

MR. p. v. Harrison : Which? recently pulled to pieces a small advertisement (not, I suggest, put in by an advertising agency) concerning the discount on carpets. By chance I noticed an advertisement from the same firm in The Sunday Timesy and the whole character of the advertisement had been altered. The misleading part of the advertisement, which related to substantial discount, had been removed. I do suggest this would not have happened unless the consumer protection association concerned had in fact taken the action of checking on the advertisement from this firm to see whether or not it was speaking the truth.

the lecturer : I was for many years on the Council of the Retail Trading Standards Association, and we had many such cases. It sounds to me more like one of their jobs than one of Which?' s. Obviously this sort of service is immensely valuable, but the point I was making was that I don't believe the average member of the public is going to be influenced in relation to small articles - and is rather doubtful even about big ones - by objective appraisal of the kind carried out by Which?.

dr. v. G. w. Harrison, F.Inst. p. : It seems to me that advertising has possibly three functions. The first is to give me information about something which I already want, but need guidance as to which type is most suited to my particular need. The second, as the lecturer said, is to arouse in me a latent desire which I had not realized existed but which I now want to fulfil. The third is to make me buy something I don't really want. To the first type, the informative, belong the small ads in the trade papers, about gardening or do-it-yourself or radio. Many people find those advertisements more interesting than the main text of the magazine, and if I want to buy a tool for making a particular type of hole in some material I can probably get the information I need in those small advertisements, which for the most part will say exactly what the tool does and what its advantages are.

But when we come on to the question of cars, I, like most people, have to make the best choice within a price range, and I want certain information : about top speed, acceleration, gears, braking distance, petrol consumption and so on. Why is it so extremely difficult to extract this information from manufacturers? I can get beautifully illustrated brochures showing glamorous couples arriving at the opera, but the technical information is very difficult to obtain. I have even been to the Motor Show and consulted salesmen on these things and thrown them into panic. There is a curious reticence on the part of manufacturers of, say, cars, washing machines and so forth, to give the sort of information that small advertisers in trade papers realize is very necessary.

The other comment I have is on the claims made by advertisements for toothpaste and detergents, which are plainly quite absurd, and so self-contradictory that they are either mildly amusing or irritating. I wonder if they really serve any useful purpose?

Lastly, what about the type of advertisement which does not actually state an untruth but certainly suggests it very strongly? This is applied to certain sweets or jams, for example. I wonder why that type of near-dishonesty is permitted.

the lecturer : I cannot help you much on cars as I do not know anything about how the manufacturers' minds react. I do know something about washing machines and refrigerators, and I am perfectly certain that the advertisers think they are giving all the information that is wanted and will be helpful to the purchaser. I cannot believe that if neither the motoring correspondent nor the manufacturers give the information you speak of there can be a very large number of people who want it. I think it is a

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fault of the industrialist, the sponsor, not of the 'advertising' that you are complaining of.

As to toothpaste, your point is perfectly valid; on the other hand this kind of advertising seems to work, and there is nothing you can say about the toothpaste anyway, and therefore one has to weave into that particular situation some subjective values which may seem to you superficial or unimportant, but which, if they work, are not, since the objective of the advertising and of the company which spends its money on the advertising is to sell the goods.

On the question of the claims of fruits and jams, I would entirely agree with you that such things ought to be stopped, and I think you will find that a lot of them will be stopped by bodies like the Code of Advertising Practice Committee. The Com- mittee has, for example, already put an embargo on advertisements which purport to be editorials. I think those things will gradually be put right, but human ingenuity in slightly distorting the truth is very considerable.

MR. g. p. D. pease: I am sorry that Mr. Hobson raised the old problem of the social acceptability of salesmanship. I should have thought that this was dead and buried long ago. I am a Member of the Institute of Marketing, which was set up many years ago to try and put this right, and I think it has succeeded. I should rather like to suggest that perhaps sometimes we on the marketing side have reason to suspect the acceptability of some members of the advertising profession !

the lecturer : I am afraid the problem is not dead and buried yet. Though it is certainly becoming more and more acceptable, there are large and influential areas of opinion which still don't accept salesmanship. I am afraid I cannot agree with you that salesmanship has yet been vindicated throughout the whole of the population, and all I can say is good luck to you as you go on in your efforts to make it so.

MR. j. A. given (Mather and Crowther Ltd.): Mr. Hobson implied that there would be an increase in manufacturer-orientated situations with the abolition of retail price maintenance. Could he confirm this, and also comment on the suggestion that there will concurrently be a considerable increase in retailer-orientated situations?

the lecturer: We are all looking into the crystal ball. It is true that in America they have no retail price maintenance and they have this vast supermarket operation, and it may be that things will go that way in this country, but I think that initially if there is more shopping in supermarkets there will also tend to be more looking for known brands. There seems to be an awful lot of advertising still in America. The ratio of advertising to the gross national product in America is at least 25 per cent higher than it is here.

the chairman : It has been a most interesting evening, covering a most remarkable variety of subjects from twist drills to toothpaste and The Times. I admit that I read The Times , but it is only by accident that I read the advertisements in The Times . The accident of reading advertisements happens much more frequently if I am reading another paper. I was particularly gratified to hear Mr. Hobson's reference to the control being imposed on advertising by itself. That is far more effective, in my view, than any legislation applied by government or other bodies, and I hope the advertisers press ahead with that because I think they still have some way to go, although I am certain they have made progress.

I am sure you would all want me to express your very great appreciation to Mr. Hobson.

The vote of thanks to the Lecturer was carried with acclamation , and the meeting then ended.

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II. THE TECHNIQUES OF MODERN ADVERTISING

delivered on Monday qth March 1964, with Peter Л. Le Neve Foster , a Member of Council of the

Society , in the Chair

the chairman : As this is the second Cantor Lecture of the series Mr. Hobson will have already been introduced to you. I am in the Chair tonight both as a Member of Council of the Society and as a retired member of the advertising business. The last major job I undertook before I retired from advertising was to prepare a report on the basic principles which should be applied in recruiting people for advertising. One of the points that I made in that report was that if you are recruiting graduates as trainees who are eventually going to occupy senior management positions in advertising, you should go every time for people with a classical education. It is therefore a great pleasure to find that Mr. Hobson has had a very good classical education indeed.

The following Ixture , which was illustrated with lantern slides , was then delivered.

In this second lecture I want to tell you something about the processes behind the advertising which permeates the time and space you inhabit. To most people advertising means two things. It means the impression of a vast and seemingly inconsequential output of messages, most of which do not interest them, so that advertising seems very wasteful. Secondly, it means a few particular advertisements which stay in their minds as ones they like or dislike, or have notably found helpful or boring or colourful or distasteful or amusing or misleading or repetitive or intrusive or lively or dull.

To some extent both impressions are illuminated by one fact which, naturally, is not generally appreciated by those not involved in the practice of advertising. It is this. While the main media of communications - the Press, the posters, the television, the cinema - have to broadcast the advertising messages indiscriminately, any one message is likely to be of interest only to a certain part of the total audience. These people will find the advertisement helpful ; to the others, or indeed to these same people at a different time, it will be boring and superfluous. It is an axiom that virtually no product, and therefore no advertisement, can be of equal interest to everybody at the same time.

The impression of a vast waste of superficial effect and purposeless effort is also increased by the belief that advertisements are the outcome of someone's bright idea or momentary inspiration, rather unrelated to any serious intention other than to capture the eye.

What I want to describe to you this evening is the careful planning and thinking and research that leads, in almost every case, to each advertisement being given its particular form and content, and its direction to a selected audience of potential buyers. Do not forget that each advertisement represents a serious expenditure by sponsors who have no money to waste. When industry spends, as it does, something

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like £225 million on display advertising for consumer goods, it not only expects to get, but in practice actually does get, what it regards as a fair return for its outlay.

Let me go back to the basic purpose of advertising - to sell goods or services. Each particular advertising campaign for each particular product at a particular time is part of what one may loosely term a deliberate marketing intention based on carefully considered strategy and tactics. This marketing intention will start with the properties and utilities, the shape and packaging and colour of the product, will calculate the latest trends of public behaviour, recreation or outlook, the new factors in retail distribution and the effect of competition ; will take in the method of transport, trade margins, price, merchandising, wholesaling and retailing decisions, the rôle of the sales force, the after-sales service facilities, and a number of similar facts; will comprise a careful identification of the best potential market in terms of people, geography, seasons, spending power ; and will duly then arrive at the advertising message, and the deployment of budget best calculated to carry it. The choice of advertising is virtually the last element to be decided in the marketing complex, and, although it may represent a very large part of the financial outlay and may in the result determine the success or failure of the whole marketing plan, it is in itself very largely governed by the other elements in the plan. Because the advertisements are the main, and certainly most obvious, of the outward and visible signs of the plan, many people get the impression that the advertising is the only really important element, that it is the plan in its own right. It may serve a useful purpose to have put its true function into perspective.

Next it is worth remarking that virtually no two marketing plans, or their consequent advertising execution, have identical intentions. There are of course certain broad groups of similar circumstances which call for fairly similar treat- ments; but within each tactical situation, on which each plan is based, there are certain to be differing weights of contributory factors which make every case different from every other. It is not feasible to lay down a kind of blueprint that will fit the needs of a number of marketing or advertising intentions.

The two most crucial stages in developing an advertising campaign are the strategic decision on objectives and the choice of creative treatment: the former is very much bound up in the total marketing intention, the latter is very much a matter of advertising techniques.

The considerations leading to the strategic decision are as wide and various as commerce itself. Nevertheless it is possible to list five main types of consideration which normally affect the advertising objectives :

the range of type and intensity of consumer wants comprising the market for our product, together with estimates of the trends of public outlook or trade development, which may affect these wants in the future ;

the special competence of the product itself ; the strength of the sponsor's resources for promoting it; the existing disposition of competitors' strength; the type of purchasing occasion arising from the character of distribution

for this type of product.

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 One talks of 'the market' for a type of product, but this apparently straight-

forward concept of 'the market' conceals a wide variety of types and degrees of want - varying by age, geography, outlook, habit, price, occasion of usage, availability and so on. By means of painstaking assembly of facts, through market research, retail contacts, and all types of fact-finding, we can calculate the size of the potential sale for our product, associated with each type of degree of want, and thus set up a choice of different objectives for the advertising. It is virtually axiomatic that no product is ever equally perfect for all sectors of the market.

First consideration in choosing our particular objective will probably be the special qualities or performance of our product itself. We shall even consider whether the addition or adjustment of qualities could create a better advertising proposition. The decision will also be affected by the areas of strength or weakness of the competitor. It is no good tackling head-on an objective where strong competition is entrenched.

A vital factor is the resources which our sponsor can put behind his campaign. Only too often sponsors with big ambitions but slender resources attempt an objective too big for them.

The strategic advertising decision will also be influenced very much by the type of purchasing occasion - an impulse market, a carefully considered purchase, a product limited by distributive conditions to tied outlets, a cut-price supermarket situation, and so on.

Finally, one must look forward from the market, the competition and the distribution, as they now exist, to possible developments foreseen as a result of trends in public spending, outlook and living patterns, and position the product in its market accordingly.

Let me illustrate this area of the strategic advertising decision with the case in the breakfast cereal market. Here are five products which have deliberately chosen to aim at five different sectors of the market. The market leader uses his dominant resources to promote a broad sense of pleasure and wholesomeness, that can apply to everyone. Another brand with a more rugged product and a lower budget concentrates on youngsters through their sporting interests. A third attacks a limited but specific health area. A fourth goes for the children's market with the appeal of a sense of fantasy and fun, while a fifth tackles the same market with the appeal of premium gifts.

In my personal view this strategic decision overrides even the creative decision in importance. The most sparkling and competent creative execution will be wasted if the policy objectives are not correctly chosen. I have, alas, seen it happen only too often. At the same time, within the right strategic decision, there is wide scope for success or failure, for brilliance or dullness, for competence or incompetence, in the creative execution.

There are three main considerations likely to influence the approach to the creative decision. The first is the tactical objective of the particular phase of advertising; the second is the actual choice of main and secondary selling arguments; and the third is the manner or atmosphere of the presentation of those selling arguments.

As I have said, there are an infinite variety of tactical situations. To name a few -

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we may be launching a new product whose new utilities need proclaiming and explaining. We may be announcing a dramatic piece of news like a price reduction or a new model. We may be merely sustaining the memory of an established brand name with a fresh rendering of its well known claim. We may be expounding to a managerial audience the virtues and the responsibility of a serious industrial concern. We may be concerned to give a company in the popular consumer goods field a favourable image against which its goods will sell automatically. We may be engaged in an anxious race for our brand against a very similar brand of some other firm to gain a larger share of the market. We may be more concerned with widening the total market for our class of goods because, if the market widens, our brand must automatically gain the lion's share.

There are probably three main elements in the tactical use of advertising - to penetrate, to remind, and to create favourable associations, and the relative importance of each element in the plan of the particular campaign will tend to determine which type of media or campaign approach will be used. For example, television and large spaces in press and magazines are ideal media for telling a story in depth, while posters and smaller press spaces and short television flashes (little more than moving posters) are good for repetition which, as Dr. Kelvin points out in his work Advertising and the Human Memory , is not merely a preven- tion of forgetting, but rather the means of progressive assimilation of the advertising message.

Then we come to the question of the selling arguments. It might seem as if the choice were obvious - determined simply by the properties of the product. This, however, is unlikely to be the majority case. It will be true at a moment of time when our product has clear and simply expressed product advantages over the competition; but this situation will not hold good for long because it will only be a matter of time before the competition is forced to include those same advantages. Look around the whole field of consumer goods and you will find very few markets in which there are not a handful of equally good competitive brands. If one has edged ahead in product quality, the others have caught up. Indeed, this continuous competitive improvement is one of the great merits of the system of which advertising is part. Our advertising in this situation has to find some aspect of our brand on which to focus - an aspect of special importance to some important section of the market, and an aspect on which the competition has not focused. Nor is this limitation of the scope of the product claim to a single aspect a disadvan- tage; indeed quite the reverse. The consumer finds it far easier to identify, and therefore to remember at time of purchase, a product which has one single claim associated with it. So, however many good points a product may have, it is wise for the advertising to focus on one only, and allow the other values to emerge in course of use. Naturally, that one point must be an important one capable of influencing a sizeable part of the market.

What are the techniques for assessing the best choice of product claim? First there is the obvious selection of an objective built-in utility superior to that of competition, but as I said, this is usually a short-lived advantage. Next there is the historic flair and inspiration of the salesman for judging what the public want

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 most in the area of this product, and for concentrating on this aspect of the brand's properties. This competence, whether rational or intuitive, is one of the chief qualities of a great industrialist or a great salesman. But in the acute competition of to-day, and where the stakes are high and the penalties great, the hit-or-miss risks of intuition are not always acceptable. Market research, and especially depth research, are more and more employed to help in defining those areas to which the product's copy claims can best be directed. Let me explain these terms. Market research covers all types of consumer investigation, but is generally associated with research designed to establish a pattern of behaviour. From the patterns of behaviour by people of various descriptions the motives of that behaviour are deduced. Depth research, or motivation studies as they are called, consist of interviews directly designed to establish attitudes, motives and feelings about products and their usage, without the risks of deducing them from behaviour patterns.

A lot has been written and spoken about 'hidden persuaders' since Vance Packard's book was written. Certainly the book over- dramatized what is a very natural and sensible process. Let us be clear that in buying, as in many aspects of life, the number of decisions that can be taken on strictly rational grounds is very few; not only because it is seldom possible to assemble all the facts, but also because rational decisions involve a painful and complicated mental process which only a few people are either capable or willing to undertake. Therefore the majority of decisions are made out of feelings, habits, instincts and impulses. It is common sense therefore to try to chart those feelings, habits and impulses which surround the purchase of goods you are selling. There is nothing much more sinister in doing so (although people have represented it as sinister) than in the Vicar, who wants a contribution to the Church Roof Fund from his rich parishioner, starting the conversation on the subject of the old brasses in which he knows she is particularly interested.

The purpose of any such research, as indeed of the alternative flair and intuition, is to establish that aspect of the product's claims which interests a large enough market, which has been neglected by competitors, and with which therefore this particular brand can become associated with major selling effect. Sometimes, of course, the need for being different leads to an exaggerated or partly untenable version of a claim, even among well-intentioned salesmen. The public's safeguard in this case is that, since the success of any product depends on repeat purchases, not merely on a single purchase, and since nothing makes the public react away from a product more than disappointment in an advertised claim, it is bad commercial policy as well as undesirable ethics to fall into the trap of exaggerated or dishonest claims.

The third main area of consideration I want to discuss in the approach to the creative decision is the association with which the advertising can endow the product. This is something quite apart from the substance of the claims one makes for the product yet it is of very real significance in the selling situation. It is the same subjective element which when applied to corporations is sometimes called the 'image'. It arises from the fact that when people make a purchase, they do not only

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buy a thing having objective values, but they buy a total satisfaction which includes subjective values also. The most obvious case is a woman buying a hat. She does not only buy a head-covering or a piece of coloured felt, she buys a satisfaction that includes such subjective values as fashionableness, a feeling of style, a sense of daring or renewed youth or whatever. But while this is an obvious case, the same principle applies just as readily to purchases of everyday things. With petrol you buy a sense of power or the feeling of a wise bargain. With beer you may buy a sense of manliness, or a sense of fun or a sense of healthfulness. With chocolate biscuits you may buy a feeling of gaiety, and with a car you certainly do not only buy a means of transport but also a feel of dashingness, of luxury, of importance, of smartness or whatever attribute has been added to the machinery by the advertising, the line of the bonnet, or the number of marginal gadgets.

There is plenty of evidence to show that these subjective values represent a very real increase in the satisfaction of the purchase and use of the product; and the improved product commands a definite preference, and often a higher price, from the buyer than the same product not so improved. In the advertising aspect of their creation (and it is one of the most potent effects of advertising) the method is usually that of building up certain deliberate associations by the type of verbal or visual treatment, the use of colour, the associated pictures or personalities. It is as if a pattern of subjective associations is integrated with the substance of the product and becomes a real part of it. In an economy where the public could afford to pay for nothing except objective values this situation could hardly arise, but in an affluent society where virtually everyone has a spending power in excess of his physical needs, there is scope for following one's whims into the area of subjective satisfactions.

Now let me talk briefly about a few of the techniques of advertising presentation. This is a subject of endless fascination. One could talk of it for days on end. It embraces all the most intricate aspects of perception, of communication, of persuasion. It covers everything in verbal and visual techniques from journalism to poetry, from realism to impressionism, from the News of the World to Vogue . I can only hope to touch on a few of the main points.

The first is to recognize the different audiences to whom the advertising must be addressed: top management or the housewife in the Durham back streets; children or the fashion-conscious women of society; bank managers or miners. The tone, the contents, the treatment will vary according to the audience. But certain factors will remain reasonably constant.

The first need for any advertisement is to gain attention. By and large, people do not aim to read advertisements - though in fact the advertisement section of a woman's magazine has a high readership in its own right. However, even here one is wise to start with the assumption that people will not want to read a particular advertisement. In the newspapers advertisements have to capture attention. On television, there is much talk of a captive audience, but this can be misleading. The audience may be captive, but its attention is not necessarily so ; it may be talking or knitting or reading.

Let me offer a first axiom for getting attention : that it is the interest of the message

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY Of ARTS JULY 1 964

that attracts attention - not its size or its visual impact or its violence. The eye and mind work so fast that they shrug off instinctively a first impact of size or surprise or violence in an advertisement, before they have even assimilated what it is about, unless subconsciously there is an awakening of genuine interest. Clearly interest in a product message is not universal ; it will always limit itself to some section of the total public. For example, even a little advertisement headed 'Indigestion' will be noticed by the 3 or 4 per cent of people who at that moment are conscious of having a problem of indigestion. One of the reasons why advertising gets a bad name for being excessive or boring is that unavoidably far more people are going to be exposed to far more messages than can conceivably be of interest to them personally. Men particularly become irritated with all the household advertisements which have no interest for them. In newspapers one can select those advertisements on which, because they say something of personal interest, one wants to focus, and ignore the rest. On television it is not so easy to ignore those of no personal interest, and this is why television tends to get a worse name than the Press does.

Since the attention of an advertisement is gained by the first awakening of interest, it is vital that the attention-getting element should signal the sector of interest the advertisement aims to attract. Otherwise one may only attract interest that cannot lead to sales.

Humour, so beloved of many superficial observers of advertising, is a dangerous weapon for this reason, because (although it can add a certain cheerfulness to the image of the product) it too often attracts the attention of masses of people who are not potential buyers, and it may obscure or even damage the serious appeal to those who are.

The second key factor in an advertisement is the essential need to offer a benefit - to those forming the potential market. People neither buy, nor want to think about buying, something that does not promise them a benefit for their money. It may sound a self-evident truth, but it is surprising how often it gets overlooked in the intricate and elaborate process of advertisement creation. Ideally the benefit should be clearly conveyed in the attention-getting element in the advertisement. Sometimes the sponsors of advertisements, or the creators of them, are so shy about their whole function of selling that they will go to great lengths to avoid seeming to intrude anything so blatant as a selling point in the advertisement. But really the function of advertising is not to amuse, not to educate, not to pretty the hoardings or enliven the newspapers; it is to sell, and only when the salesmanship is assured can it afford to do the other things as well.

The third element on which I would focus as important is that of giving a 'reason why' - that is, the reason why this product can offer this benefit. As I said earlier, more is often achieved through an appeal to the emotions than to the mind (because people are lazy about using their minds) ; but people are both mind and emotion, and their emotions react better if they are offered some concession to their logical process as well. It is wiser therefore to say 'X is better because . . .' than just 'X is better'.

The final element in a good advertisement in my view is a bold display of the brand name. Once again it may seem obvious. After all, the function of an advertise-

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ment is to get a product asked for or at least recalled by name in a shop. But there are some people who believe that a prominent display of a brand name will make people pass on from your advertisement because they believe they know what you are going to say about your product. This is a risk which in my view must be taken, and be counteracted by the other elements in your advertisement. I have known advertisers who believed that their advertisements were so well liked and recognized that it was smart to leave the name out altogether. This I regard as treating advertising as some kind of parlour game, not the expensive, productive and important process it really is.

Ideally the benefit should be one which your product alone can offer: it may be desirable to go back to the product formula and build in some unique added benefit that its competitors do not comprise. It may only be possible to seek a unique way to express the benefit, or a unique aspect of the benefit to stress. Most products can offer a whole spectrum of benefits ranging from solid factors such as the price and performance to elaborate subjective benefits derived from the manner of presenting either the product or the advertising. Somewhere at some point of this spectrum you can colour your product's advertising with a unique shade that gives it a separate identity from its competitors. It is vital to end up by leaving in the public's mind a clear identity for your product - a uniqueness in an important selling area; what has been termed by one great American expert, my colleague Rosser Reeves, a Unique Selling Proposition.

This positive proposition of a benefit can then be enhanced by any of a wide range of subjective associations - which, providing they are relevant to the purchase of the product, can add to its total attraction. Such associations may be gay or fanciful or fashionable ; they may offer a sense of a bargain, or of youthfulness, or of keeping up with the Joneses. These are well-tried examples; there are many others. From these elements the total advertising presentation is built up to do its job of making a potential market want to buy this product through the promise of a satisfaction which is part objective and part subjective.

I will refer finally to one last basic advertising technique, as it concerns the total effect and sequence of the advertisements for a product - what we in advertising call a campaign . This technique was crystallized by Sir William Crawford, one of the great advertising technicians of the early days, in the three -word precept, 'concentration - domination - repetition'. It is still, and must always be, the clearest reflection of the processes which go to make up mass selling.

Concentration means the selection of one shade in the spectrum of possible appeals for the product and the avoidance of diversity of appeal and dispersal of resources. It implies, of course, the careful selection of the appeal best calculated to gain a response from a sector of the market, which in turn is calculated to offer the best sales potential, having regard to the particular attributes of the product, the state of competitive activity and the resources available for promotion. It would be useless to select an area of product appeal which brought head-on collision with a competitor of much greater resources, or to comprise a sector of wants to which the available budget was insufficient to do justice. It implies also the virtues of simplicity and single-mindedness in execution. Concentration .

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 Domination means the gathering of the available forces of money and presentation

techniques in such a way as to create a dominant impact on the minds of the chosen public. It will comprise an element of bigness or size at the initial stages of the campaign so as to gain attention and outweigh competitive claims. It will ensure that in the selected area of consumer want, the name of the product will come out top of the alternatives in the memory of the potential customers. Given a budget insufficient to cover all areas or classes or segments of the public, domination will necessitate a concentration of effort in terms of geography or choice of media or some other means so that in that area of concentration the product can outweigh all rivals. Domination .

Repetition is an essential part of the technique of all advertising. For various reasons : first that with most consumer goods it is the repeated purchase that makes the selling investment pay off. The product drops only too easily out of the mind and memory, and is supplanted by some lively newcomer unless the satisfied customers are reminded. Then it must be remembered that virtually no first impact of advertising reaches everybody; what appears to be repetition is very often merely a continuation of first impact on groups of customers not previously reached with the message. Every week of every year a new group of potential customers grows into the market. The advertising campaign therefore needs to be continued over time , and a disposition of available resources must be made accordingly. Repetition .

Concentration - domination - repetition - is a fine formula, and if you study most successful advertising campaigns you will find they conform with it.

Ladies and gentlemen, finally I must now add into the measurements of good advertising the essential fourth dimension. I shall be told, and rightly, especially by my creative colleagues, that I have been treating the subject almost as a mathematical formula. On top of the rightness, there must always be brightness. There must be vitality, craftsmanship, humanity and creative inspiration to turn cold salesmanship into warm sparkling communication. My reason for giving so little room to this vital element is partly that I myself am what is called a 'numbers' man. I can react to, and appreciate, creative vitality when I see it, but I cannot analyse it and talk about it. Partly also I am concerned to ensure that when so many people tend to think of advertising in terms of its superficial effect, there should be a proper understanding of the thought and the engineering that underlies it. Advertising is selling, and unless the selling message is well chosen it does little good if it is brilliantly communicated. Brightness alone is not enough !

To avoid interrupting this lecture I have so far given no illustrations from television. So let me now remedy this, and at the same time remind you of some of the quality and vitality of good advertising by running through a short reel of commercials which I personally consider fine examples of British advertising.

DISCUSSION the chairman : I should like to ask Mr. Hobson a rather controversial question :

would he agree that it is quite possible to have advertising which is very successful commercially and, on a short term, financially, but which on a long term might be extremely bad public relations for the company which puts it out?

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the lecturer: There is a good deal in the implication of that question! If an advertisement can combine both full-time selling effect and good long-term image- building for the company that sells it, it must be a better advertisement than one which merely has the first and not the second. But it is very important to remember that the long-term value in almost any situation resides in the product itself. In other words, if it is used and gives satisfaction and is well spoken of, these things do more good for the long-term future of the company than the mere image-building factors. I believe that not even advertising which is unlikely to build a good image will do much damage to the long-term effect of satisfied use and recommendation, but obviously I must agree with you that it is better to have both than to have only one. Still, I would rather have the selling if I could not have the image.

the chairman : If you had a choice you would prefer the short-term benefit that you are sure of, rather than the long-term benefit which is perhaps rather indefinite?

the lecturer : Provided I felt sure I had a good product, which would recommend itself.

MR. Michael wright (Granada Television, Sales/Advertising Department) : I was very interested in Mr. Hobson's comment concerning humour. I believe he said that humour had not a great part to play in an overall advertising campaign, yet I notice that the last reel of commercials which we saw contained three, possibly four, examples of good humour.

the lecturer: Good humour, yes. The only example of humour, I think, was Guinness, and I put that in because I could not resist seeing it again. But I am not sure that it is very good advertising. I suspect that the straight slogan, 'Guinness is good for you', has done very much more for Guinness sales than that kind of more humorous advertising did. I do not know the sales figures, but I am told that since Guinness came back on to the straight old slogan advertising in press and posters they have done a great deal better than they did at the time they were showing that kind of commercial.

The test is good humour, surely, rather than just humour. I think it is a very important distinction. There is never anything very funny about spending money; even if it is only fourpence it is a little bit of a wrench, and I think therefore there are very few occasions when humour can really help to create a desire to buy. There are times when it adds to the image of the product and makes it seem pleasant, and I certainly do not include good humour in these remarks. There is every reason for using good humour at all times in advertising as the associated atmosphere.

MR. E. m. paddock : I am often struck by the absence of any direct link, particularly in poster advertising, between the design of the poster and the brand name. I remember a poster for a new detergent which was very striking in conception, but my wife could not remember the name. People have been struck by the fact that if you took away the name of the brand you could substitute anything at all, especially where consumer goods like lipsticks, cigarettes and toothpaste are concerned. Could the lecturer make some comment on this?

the lecturer : Mr. Paddock is touching on a very sore subject to anyone concerned with advertising. In a situation where there are three or four products very similar in performance, it is very hard to create a distinction which will be remembered and at the same time will help to sell the product. It is the problem we are struggling with all the time in the advertising business. You may get weight of money to help you, you may get a good phrase occasionally, you may get some special associations that are different from other people's, but I am afraid there is an awful lot of advertising

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 where the parlour game offers you three or four alternative brand names, unless you have been studying the market very closely.

At the same time, if you are relying on advertising merely to bring a product into your mind at some time other than when in the shop, this is a weakness, but if you can interest people in what you have to say at the moment when they are looking at the advertisement, then with luck you will get your name remembered in association with the product.

the chairman : Is it not one of the fundamental difficulties in the graphic side of advertising that very often you are really trying to draw a picture of an abstraction, and you can only represent an abstraction graphically by using a symbol? For example, the Kodak girl in the famous striped skirt, using a camera. Is not the last questioner's real point to ask how one represents an abstraction graphically without making the advertisement too like a work by Picasso?

the lecturer: It is very much easier to do it with words than with pictures. If you can get a phrase that is remembered, like 'Guinness is good for you', which I suppose is the classic, it is there for all time. The Kodak girl is a very interesting example of an association with the name Kodak, but after so many years the Kodak girl herself has got a bit out of date, and you are not really quite sure whether you have got the best result of the recall. I do not know whether anybody else would like to contribute on this point? It is absolutely at the heart of the whole problem of advertising.

MR. c. H. JOURDAN (Chairman, Parker Knoll Ltd.) : Does it mean that at any one time, time being a period of a year or three years or whatever it is, you have got to maintain your type of advertising and change it gradually? I am thinking of a gradual change, as in the case of Woodbine cigarettes, for instance, where they altered their packages by stages. They were able to then arrive at an entirely different picture. Perhaps other advertisers could do the same, and have a gradual change-over?

the lecturer : I think that on the whole clients tire of their advertising much too soon, and don't run it for long enough. It takes a surprisingly long time for a basic idea to get associated with a product in such a way that it lives in the memory when the advertisement is not there. Obviously the advertisement is still doing its job from the word go, because it is offering a benefit associated with the product name of that benefit, and that may last long enough to create one purchase, which may in turn lead to a series of purchases because the product has given satisfaction. But if you want to play the parlour game, and expect people to walk around with the associations of brand names and advertising campaigns in their heads, then I think you have got to go on for a very long time.

MR. p. v. Harrison: I have seen it reported recently that the power of television advertising in the United States is falling off and the power of newspaper advertisements is rising. Would Mr. Hobson say whether this is true, and would he like to comment on the reasons for it?

the lecturer : I am afraid I have not any knowledge of the situation in the United States. As far as this country is concerned, I think that the power of television advertising shows no signs of diminishing - the cost is rising a little, and therefore relatively it is losing a little ground, but it still seems to be extremely powerful.

MR. p. F. stewart : Returning to the question of the name, surely this problem must be related to the objective, that is, the strategic objective to which you referred. For instance, the drinking chocolate market is dominated by one brand. The manufacturer concerned need not aim at putting the name over strongly as long as drinking

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chocolate is promoted - as it will almost certainly be his brand that is bought. On the other hand, where a market is divided between lots of similar products and one is trying to establish a brand, not only must the brand name be established but also it must be closely linked with the product. This would be the objective of the advertising in this case.

the lecturer : Yes, though there are obviously quite different degrees of importance of establishing the brand name. For the last five years, drinking chocolate has so dominated the market that all we wanted to do was to get chocolate used more ; but there could arise competitive situations, in which case you would want to focus more on the brand name. Take toilet soaps. Each of them has pretty well established an aspect for itself, a shade of the spectrum of the present toilet soap market. They have done it partly by advertising, partly by colour, partly by smell. They are automatically recognized as having a shade of particular product appeal attached to each brand.

MR. peter DRUMMOND-MURRAY : Would the speaker like to say something about the difficulties of advertising ranges where there is no obvious common benefit. I have in mind such things as men's toiletries and garden products.

the lecturer : I do not believe it is possible to put over a heterogeneous range of products in an advertisement or a campaign. You can only put over a homogeneous range. In other words, you must have a common denominator, and that must be the headline or spearhead of the advertisement. I am a great believer in what I call unity marketing, which means never marketing more than one unit, such as a bottle of Dubonnet, or a Mars Bar, as opposed to Heinz, being a range. But of course you cannot in fact avoid having a range situation on a large number of occasions. Then you have got to do one of two things: either you must take one product out of the range, usually the largest selling unit, like Heinz tomato soup, and focus entirely on that, or you have got to find the common denominator for the range.

The risk about common denominators is that they never have quite as much bite in them - if I am not mixing my metaphors - as the similar points for single brands. It is very difficult to advertise ranges, and a lot of people make that mistake. Take men's toiletries; if you can, in fact, find either a point of prestige association or a particular perfume, and focus on that, you may get somewhere ; but first of all you have got to find out whether those two things mean anything anyway.

the chairman : I am sure you would like me to thank Mr. Hobson. He has not only given us a very stimulating talk. He has shown us a lot of very interesting pictures and has obviously taken an enormous amount of time to collect the material for this lecture.

The vote of thanks was carried with acclamation , and the meeting then ended.

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III. THE INFLUENCE OF ADVERTISING ON MASS MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION

delivered on Monday 16 th March 1964, with Peter A. Le Neve Foster , a Member of Council of the

Society , in the Chair

the chairman: The Cantor Lectures, of which there are generally three series in each Session, exercise a very considerable influence in their respective fields. They are reprinted as a special issue of the Journal of the Society, and many of them have in fact become standard reference works. I don't think there is any doubt that Mr. Hobson's lectures will join some of the other very eminent ones, and will themselves become a standard work of reference on a side of advertising in which works of reference are all too few.

The following lecturey which was illustrated with lantern slides , was then delivered .

In my first Lecture I spoke of the social and economic context - including some of the social problems - in which advertising finds itself. In my second Lecture I described some of the tactical and creative techniques of the advertising campaign. In this third and last Lecture, I propose to deal first with the effects of the volume of advertising spending on the media of public communication. Here too I propose to talk in terms of consumer display advertising, rather than in terms of other types of advertising activity.

Let me start with a chart showing the volume of expenditure on various types of advertising activity in 1962:

TABLE i ADVERTISING EXPENDITURE 1 962

Total Advertising ¿479 m* Sales Promotion Activities

(Catalogues, leaflets, window and shop display, exhibitions, free samples and gift schemes)... £ 122 m.

Classified Advertising (Personal, Jobs, Houses, Goods, Services) ... 35 m.

Trade and Technical Advertising 32 m. Retail and Financial Announcements 65 m.

£254 m.

Consumer Display Advertising* £>225 m-

Source: Advertising Expenditure in ig62 ; a re-appraisal , by John Treasure.

From it you will see that the controversial area of consumer display advertising accounts for some £ 22 5 million. Sales promotion activities bear little on the

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media of communication; they have their own. Trade and technical advertising is confined mainly to trade and technical periodicals. Of the £325 million of advertising in the general media, £35 million is Classified advertising and £65 million is in financial and retail announcements, leaving £225 million of consumer display advertising. The author of these calculations has further estimated that this £225 million of advertising subsidizes television and press services to the extent of £75 million. So that it is worth noting that the service of display advertising costs the community about £150 million p.a. It is worth bearing this calculation in mind when discussing the volume of 'advertising' about which some critics are so vocal.

TABLE II DISPLAY AND ANNOUNCEMENT ADVERTISING 1 962

National and London Evening Newspapers £63 m. Provincial newspapers 34 m. Magazines and periodicals 38 m. Other publications 3 m. Production costs 15 m.

Total Press £153 m.

Television £83 m. Posters and transport 16 m. Outdoor signs 15 m. Cinema 5 m. Miscellaneous and administration 18 m.

Total £290 m.

Source: Advertising Expenditure in 1962 : a re-appraisal , by John Treasure.

My second chart shows how the 1962 total of £290 million comprising the consumer display element and the financial and retail announcements was spent in terms of particular media. These two charts will show the scope and pattern of the discussion which follows.

I must begin by describing the processes and attitudes which advertisers and their agencies bring to bear on the choice of media for their selling campaigns. I refer particularly to agencies because in this area, more perhaps than any other except the straight creative areas, the agency's advice to the advertiser is likely to be of decisive importance.

The objective of the advertiser or his agency in selecting a list of media is to reach the maximum number of the right kind of people with the right frequency distribution, and in the right mood or atmosphere, for the lowest cost per 1000.

The first element here is the quantity for the cost. Not just quantity of any people but of the right people, the ones forming the best potential market for the

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particular goods or services. As I said in relation to the defining of advertising objectives, few, if any, products have an equal market potential among everybody in the population. Almost every product can sell better and at lower selling cost to some selected group - defined as men or women, young or old, married or single, with younger or older families, North or South, richer or poorer. Just as the creative advertising plan follows the definition of the market, so also must the media plan, and so the assessment of quantities must be made in terms of the target groups rather than of total audience or readership. Some media clearly define themselves as having a group character. Local newspapers, for example, define themselves geographically. Women's magazines define themselves by sex. Magazines define themselves by class and purchasing power, according to their price and their contents. Specialist journals define themselves by their specialist interests from yachting to philately, from retail grocery to medicine. But even within the totals of what are normally regarded as general newspapers or magazines there are underlying geographical, age or class biases. Within the overall structure of television there are different audience compositions at different times and with different programmes.

The advertising interests as a whole spend as much as £500,000 a year to keep track of these variations and to put a fine measurement on them. Here are some of the researches which are currently used to measure the numbers.

[At this point the Lecturer displayed specimen pages from the National Readership Surveys , the Television Audience Measurement Surveys , etc.]

The technique of these assessments is largely a sample survey, measuring actual exposure to the newspapers, magazines, television programmes, etc. Figures of circulations, while still quoted as a rough overall guide, have much less importance than the figures obtained by research showing particular group readership and viewership.

Just as media are scrutinized for their component quantities, they are also scrutinized for certain other elements in their character. These consist partly of objective characteristics like their capacity to carry fine printing or colour, or movement, or sound, or to operate at certain desired seasons or intervals; and partly of subjective characteristics, like their mood, their prestige, their urgency, their leisureliness, or their authenticity, which can help to reinforce the mood of advertisers' messages of various kinds.

The refinements of planning and buying a media schedule occupy a great deal of the agency's effort. It is by no means as simple a process as it looks. For example, the readership of the newspaper or magazine is by no means the last step in the numerological process. This only shows total exposure to the medium. What the advertiser needs to know and take into account is the average chance of his advertisement being seen if he takes this or that size of space in a newspaper or magazine. There are good pages and less good pages. The 'page traffic' in a daily newspaper may vary from 99 per cent on the front page to as low as 25 or 30 per cent. Yet that 30 per cent gained on a Sports page may be extremely valuable to

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an advertiser selling essentially male products like pipe tobacco. Then does the expected attention value of the advertisement increase proportionately as its size increases (and the cost increases with the size)? The answer is, no, but there is an increasing suggestion of importance in the advertiser's message related to size, and this may in certain cases compensate for a diminution of frequency or coverage. Or again, given a certain level of television rating - which means the sets switched on - how many people on average are watching each set and how far are they attending when the commercials are on, or do they go out to make a cup of tea?

These and many other questions have to be evaluated so that the advertiser can decide how best, for his market, to spend his money, so as to spread over the requisite period, with the requisite combination of impact and repetition. The problem is not merely the choice of one medium, but the choice of a combination -

possibly a combination of newspapers, or of television stations, but most likely a combination of various media such as television and posters, or newspapers and magazines, or magazines and cinema and radio, and so on. The mathematical combinations are legion.

I have outlined these factors at some length because I want to make it clear that planning a schedule is treated in as close to scientific a fashion as the available facts can allow. The advertiser and his agency have no eye on the survival of newspapers or the economics of publishing; still less is he following some devious political or social objectives of his own in relation to media. (I exclude from this the negligible amount of what is really charity advertising put behind minor political reviews in which some company chairman is interested ; it does not amount to a serious factor.)

Let me add that the process is not merely one of playing an elaborate game with numbers. The basic purpose is mass selling; this is the sole justification for the exercise. Not just mass selling at any cost, but mass selling at a competitive cost. If the correct ratio of advertising costs to sales returns cannot be achieved then very likely the product cannot be marketed. If advertising cannot get the necessary ratio, perhaps some other selling method - door -to -door salesmen or coupons or trading stamps - can do so. The difference between the right media choice, and a wrong but quite sensible-seeming alternative, may be such as to make a product uncompetitive in the market place. In short, the correct media plan can be the difference between the success or failure of the project. Advertising is no longer the rough craft it used to be ; it has become - thanks to the competitiveness of national and international trading - a precision industry with only minute tolerances between success and failure.

It is sometimes suggested that the advertiser or his agency deliberately and actively seeks to force the media of communication into a mould which suits his purpose. This is not true, from all my experience. The old story that advertisers try to influence the contents of newspapers to suit their own ends has been firmly rejected by two successive Royal Commissions. The advertiser is simply seeking a low-cost vehicle for his messages; wherever he can find it, he will climb on it. Mainly he finds it in the by-products of some other function of communication

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 or entertainment. In the case of the poster a low cost medium has been created without any other function except advertising. The sequence is that the medium comes first; the advertising follows.

This aspect - the deliberate intention - of the influence of advertising on communications can, I think, be absolutely discounted.

The second aspect - the inadvertent influence - is another matter. I have outlined the picture from the buying side of advertising media. From the

selling side it looks quite different. The advertiser follows scientifically the coverage offered by the publisher. The publisher has to consider how to offer the coverage. His problems in this are well illustrated by the Royal Commission on the Press. Taking the London newspapers, for example, 5 1 per cent of their revenue is obtained from advertising. The Provincial evening newspapers derive 73 per cent of their revenue from advertising. Class Sunday newspapers, like The Observer or The Sunday Times y 80 per cent. The class newspapers depend far more heavily on advertising revenue than the popular papers. It is abundantly clear that if advertising revenue were excluded the newspapers and magazines would either have to charge far higher prices or would deliver infinitely less attractive, less well informed and less well written products. It has been calculated that, in the absence of advertising, a typical quality Sunday newspaper would have to cost is 6d, at which point presumably they would be still less in demand, so that a vicious circule would begin, with the risk that it might end in the disappearance of the Press as we know it. Moreover, it would be The Times and The Sunday Times , The Observer and The Guardian which would be the first to suffer.

Turning to television, there has been much criticism of the type of programmes put out by the commercial companies on the ground that they are designed to attract large audiences to please the advertisers. It must, however, be remembered that until the start of commercial television less than half the number of homes now owning television bothered to have it. What has happened is that the commercial stations (and under their influence the B.B.C, followed suit to meet the competition) have been giving the public what it enjoys ; and in so doing have created a valuable vehicle for advertising. There is no evidence that, generally speaking, the public object to the intervention of the commercials to the extent of being put off watching the commercial stations. Indeed, there is clear evidence that many people actually enjoy the commercials also.

The picture then that emerges is that popular reading or viewing attracts large audiences which then provide the advertiser with the carefully calculated coverage- for-money he needs. His contribution to the finances becomes so important to the publishers that they strive to maintain this popularity, and this also enables them to offer their reading matter at very popular prices (or, in the case of television, free). Thus the whole economics of the popular vehicles of communication become heavily dependent on advertising.

To our self-appointed governesses in high places - the intellectuals and the ascetics - the position seems undesirable. So governessy can they become, that one well- known economist and his associate actually offered to the Royal Commission a scheme which limited the capacity of the popular Press to be popular in order to

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foster the less popular Press. Rightly the Royal Commission rejected it. Yet the general tenor of such ideas continues.

To my mind the problem is much less of a problem than it seems to the governesses, because to me it seems important that people should be allowed to vote, with their pennies, for the kind of Press they want ; or with their switches for the kind of television programmes they prefer.

I feel it is only these self-appointed governesses, who know better than the public what is good for the public, who can find any real problem here. The essence of a free Press is that the public should be able to choose what they want. The essence of a free society is that there shall be no dictatorship of behaviour or taste or information. The truth is that, as researchers have regularly shown, the public interest in serious subjects such as politics or social policy or economics is regrettably small. Only a small percentage of newspaper readers read such articles. They prefer to be amused, entertained or lightly informed. They prefer news of trivial character to heavy news. Why should they not have it? The evidence proves con- clusively that if people are not given what they like to read or view, they will not therefore read or view something they do not like. They will not read The Times if you deprive them of the Mirror . This does not prevent those who like to be fully informed and read serious views from finding what they want in The Times , The Guardian or The Economist and the class Sundays. The key to the problem is that the public - or more of them - should want to be better informed and should have higher taste, but this is a separate objective. Let the governesses turn to our educational system and other forms of mental training and create, if it were possible, a public with the taste and the capacity for more thoughtful reading matter. This is indeed gradually coming about, but the process cannot be hustled: and mean- while, it is no good depriving those who are beginning to read of the level of reading matter they enjoy.

Please believe me, I am not laughing this problem off. It is a serious matter when old established newspapers like the News Chronicle die for lack of support. It would indeed be better if the public took political and foreign affairs more seriously.

It would indeed be happier if the capital costs of running popular newspapers were such as to allow a lesser dependence on advertising revenue. But if the economics of publishing are what they are, and if the advertisers are bound to seek value for their money - and cannot afford to subsidize lost causes with their advertising - then we must either accept the present situation or introduce a communications dictatorship. And the results of such a dictatorship would be, not to induce people to read or view something they do not want to read or view, but instead to read or view nothing; thus reversing the very clear trend to increased readership of newspapers and increased ownership of television. The assumption that people will view Ibsen if you deprive them of the opportunity for viewing Westerns is utterly wrong. They will go out and play Bingo, or go to the pubs. They will follow their own tastes.

People often ask what effect an enforced reduction of advertising would have. My best estimate would be that it would hit very hard at the print media - news-

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papers and magazines. And of these it would hit hardest at the weakest - just the ones everyone is concerned to safeguard - and at the class media, which are living on the least rewarding type of advertising - the prestige campaign. So far as was possible, some of the money would be diverted, doubtless, into sales promotion activities of various kinds - because the advertiser would still have the need to maintain selling pressure; into coupons or door-to-door salesmen or trading stamps or telephone selling, or possibly direct mail. Television would be the last to suffer in my view, and posters could be supported if only because they could, if need be, cut their rates. I doubt very much if the governesses would be pleased at the outcome.

The underlying facts of both aspects of this case is that you can either have freedom of choice of products, and of means of communication; or you can have an authoritarian system such as we had to have during the war and just after. If you allow freedom of choice it is because you regard the public as sufficiently adult to be allowed to make its own mistakes, learn its own lessons and follow its own preferences. I believe that even at the present time one can trust the British public in this matter ; but clearly if we can introduce a better educational system, and produce a better educated public, there will be even less risk of a mismanagement of freedom. Advertising follows the media of communication in reflecting the educational level that exists. If the level is higher, the media and the advertising, too, will reflect it.

I should like to round off these lectures with a brief glimpse at the future of advertising.

Three factors have come together to produce advertising as we know it: the growth of mass production techniques ; the increase and redistribution of wealth giving mass purchasing power ; and the availability since the turn of the century of regular channels of mass communication: the popular newspapers and magazines and lately the radio and television. I see no reason to suppose that any one of these causal factors is going to diminish or indeed fail to grow.

Industry is going to require salesmanship for as long as production exceeds spontaneous and necessary demand. It would presuppose an economic catastrophe to present a situation in Britain in which purchasing power were so reduced that only essential goods could be afforded.

So far from that, production techniques are certainly not going to stand still. New technology is bound to produce more goods at a faster pace. Industry is going to have to ensure that people want more of those goods. One industry will be in competition with another for available spending power; one company with another company within each industry.

There may be alternative forms of salesmanship available to industry ; but there seems little reason to believe that, as techniques for increasing the efficiency of advertising improve - for example, through the use of computers - advertising will not continue to prove the cheapest of industry's selling methods. It has the great advantage of adding to its short-term selling impact that value of building a long-term reputation for goods which assures for each product some degree of steady demand for the future, or at least a slow tailing-off of demand which permits

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adjustment of production without undue disruption. Short-term inducements to buy can never be a real substitute for the long-term persuasion on reasons for buying.

Nor will industry be standing still. New industries will be born to meet new living conditions, new convenience products, new leisure industries competing for the additional leisure which improved technology will bring, new textiles and associated goods, new electronic inventions applied to daily life; quite apart from the usual new variants of food, confectionery, and household and toilet goods.

When our politicians look back on the improved living standards of the last twenty-five years and talk about doubling our standard of living in the next twenty-five, they are talking of a process in which advertising has played and will play an essential part.

Then there is our export development. In this vital field on which our whole economic future depends, the techniques of advertising learned at home will be applied to competing for foreign trade. Moreover, we shall be up against extremely sophisticated salesmanship from certain other exporters, notably the Americans. In marketing and advertising techniques Britain is ahead of all countries except America. Already there is a race to establish our techniques abroad ahead of the others. We have an advantage inasmuch as we better understand the psychology of European and other peoples than the remote Americans do, but also a disadvan- tage in that they are farther ahead in technique.

I do not foresee, however, any material increase in total value of advertising, as measured by its cost as a percentage of the National Gross Product. It has hardly changed since before the war. In spite of a higher percentage in the United States, in Britain, I think, it has found its natural level. The current impression that advertising has increased may be due to the greater impact of the techniques now used, and also, of course, to the fact that in the under-supply situation of the post-war decade, the level naturally was lower.

In the techniques of advertising I foresee constant progress. There has indeed been much progress in the last fifteen years, particularly in the mathematics of advertising. This, I believe, will go on at accelerated speed with the introduction of facilities which only computers can provide. It is an old maxim that it is virtually impossible to separate the effect of advertising from the other ten or more elements which affect sales. This may well prove to be much less true when the computer is put to work.

If it becomes possible by calculated foresight - not by hindsight in the light of events which may be disastrous or may be successful - to predict the results which alternative levels of budget, focuses of appeal, price levels, distribution levels, types of media impact, and so on, can have on sales, then it will be possible to eliminate many of the uncertainties from advertising planning; and as a result to avoid the waste of over-spending or under-spending, the failures of ill-conceived new products, and the inefficiencies of wrongly judged themes, which undoubtedly sometimes give advertising a bad name even with the industries which employ it. In the area, too, of choice of media there are many unknowns still, both in the exact numbers and in the efficiency for selling, and these too will be gradually illuminated.

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 I believe that the contents of advertising will be better controlled by the self-

regulation of the advertising departments of industry, and of those in the agencies who practise advertising, but I do not foresee this move making a notable difference to the substance of the matter because I believe the substance of advertising has not been generally at fault. The fringes will be cleaned up and this will be all to the good.

The criticisms of advertising by a small percentage of narrow, ascetic or donnish people, largely out of touch with the greater public, will continue. Indeed advertising would not be doing its job, if they did not. I do not expect these people ever to feel at home with communications and motivations which the mass of the public understand and respond to. However, I do expect that as the modern world comes to see the need of, and to be familiar with, salesmanship, this practice and concept will become better understood and more acceptable. Perhaps the Government will sponsor a 'National Salesmanship Year' instead of a 'National Productivity Year'. Moreover, as levels of education develop, the tone and character of salesmanship will gradually change away from a noisy brashness to a more reasoned and informed persuasion.

Alongside the developing material benefits I hope that the techniques of advertising will be employed for non-commercial objectives such as religion and charity and progressive ideas. In the United States a good deal of advertising space is already used for good causes, and for stating a political or ethical case. In this country too, the Churches, the religious movements and other non- commercial interests are beginning to employ the means of communication hitherto largely used for commercial advertising. Oxfam is an outstanding example. It would be a sad thing if those who had the devotion and the intellect to understand and promote great causes, had not also the insight to see that if they want them to take root in the masses they must use the means, the idioms and the images of communication that appeal to the masses. The campaigns of the Central Office of Information during and after the war showed what can be done.

I can only see a world without the market place and the forum of advertising, if I postulate the grisly prospect of an authoritarian control of people's wants, of industry's products, of the processes of trade and of the media of communication ; and a regimentation of taste, ideas, aspirations and outlook. Those who react away from the occasional excesses of advertising in a free society should pause to consider the alternatives.

Imagine the problems of the manufacturer, if he had no means of stabilizing or developing demand for his product. Imagine the problems of employment if, in an age of continuous labour-saving improvement of technology, there were no ways of stimulating a new demand to compensate. Imagine the inhibition of technology and invention in consumer industry if there were no means of exploiting improvements. Imagine the stagnation of the economy and of the standard of living if there were no dynamic of competition, such as advertising facilitates, in the mass consumer goods area. Imagine the difficulties of daily life if there were no sustained product information or brand identification carrying its assurance of quality and of satisfaction. Imagine the consequences of succeeding with new

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production targets, if there were no means of stimulating consumption. Imagine the run-down of the whole abundant economy if there were no spur to increased earnings and no direction to increased spending.

These values of advertising are taken for granted; they are seldom brought to the surface of the mind. Let me only say in conclusion that because I have lived my life in the advertising end of industry I may naturally be inclined to see a brighter and more favourable aspect than some others. At the same time, I am ready where necessary to criticize the work in which I have spent my life. On balance, however, I believe that, while there is still much to be done to improve the performance and eliminate the weaknesses of advertising, nevertheless advertising does even now - and in the future responsible advertising will still more - deliver to the community a fine value in terms of the increase of human well being.

DISCUSSION

the chairman: I should like to ask Mr. Hobson to expand his remarks, made towards the end of his lecture, about what one might term the non-commercial applications of advertising - of which he gave a very good example in Oxfam.

the lecturer: I am aware that the Americans are using the techniques of advertising to put across points which are not commercial but are ethical, religious, political. I have also become aware that some of our Churches - the Quakers and the Roman Catholics, for example - have used advertising techniques, as well of course as Oxfam and one or two charities.

It is not essential to consider advertising as necessarily commercial. At the moment it is identified with commercial technique because of commercial operations, and it is thereby liable to be scorned by the people with good causes to advocate. This is a false connection. All that advertising tends to do is to understand the masses and communicate in the languages, the images and the ideas of the masses. The Church is quite possibly missing an opportunity if it scorns those images. It is in that kind of way that I believe advertising can be used in the future in good non-commercial causes, just as, after the war, the Central Office of Information used advertising techniques for explaining what exports meant, getting women back into industry, and promoting other valuable government objectives.

MR. c. H. Robinson: I work for a benevolent fund, and we advertise in the trade press, but I think one of our biggest problems is that members of organizations such as ours regard advertising as expensive, and when they see a full page advertisement in the trade press they wonder why in fact we are spending that much money on furthering the cause. We can always say that a particular trader has donated the space, which is in fact true, although the donor concerned won't allow us to say so. This is a problem in which we need the help of the advertising industry, because they know the techniques. I quite agree that it is a good idea to advertise your cause, but a lot of your members will think it is an extravagance to do so.

the lecturer: A very interesting comment. Probably a lot of people at that particular level do think advertising an extravagance. They have heard vast sums mentioned, and of course vast sums are involved. I take it there are means of telling them what results from the advertising - some calculation which could be made to show that, expensive as it is, the space is worth it? A million pounds is expensive or

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 not expensive according to how you look at it. In the light of Polaris a million pounds is nothing, in the light of my pocket it is a great deal of money.

the chairman : I am myself connected with what is legally a charity (though it is not a charity in the sentimental sense), and we are going into the question of spending some of our funds to raise further funds. Several members of my committee have wondered whether we are ethically entitled to spend money that has been given for the preservation of historical buildings in order to raise more money to prevent them falling down altogether. That attitude illustrates one of the reasons why there is much less non-commercial advertising in this country than there is in America. I doubt whether a comparable American committee would raise a point of ethics of this sort when the result would be that a very valuable piece of property was going to fall to pieces.

MR. R. a. c. rose (Marketing Manager, Bronco Ltd.) : Could Mr. Hobson give me any criteria for the concentration of an advertising appropriation? An advertiser hardly ever has an adequate appropriation for his purposes, but assuming that he has taken account of seasonal trends in the sale of his product, is it better for him to concentrate his appropriation so that it falls in a number of lumps, or to spread it as far as it will go?

the lecturer: I don't think there is an authoritative answer to that question. Every case is liable to be different. Let us see what factors are to be taken into account in thinking out the case. The first is the rhythm of purchase. If you have a small regular purchase, the rhythm of advertising has to be more continuous. If on the other hand you are advertising fairly expensive consumer durables, then I would not think there was the same compulsion for continuity; it is then more important to take large press spaces in which you can say a lot.

When it comes to television frequencies, you can have the argument either way round: 'Let us have a heavy hitting fortnight at four week intervals', or 'No, let us have one a week during our whole time'. I don't think anyone has yet discovered the answer. I am afraid it is a question of trial and error.

MR. A. Wilson : I should like to ask Mr. Hobson, as Chairman of a large advertising agency, whether he would welcome the start of a second commercial television service or not, and his reasons?

the lecturer: I have to be careful here, because I am Chairman of the Trades Relations Committee of I. P. A., which has a policy to which I take an entirely opposite view. The official policy is that we should welcome the start of a second channel. In my personal view it is not in the best interests of the advertisers to have a second channel, because inevitably the same quantity of listeners are going to cost more than if you have a single channel. I cannot see how the television stations can finance two alternative programmes at worth while level at a cost pro rata to the financing of a single channel. Maybe I am reactionary and quite wrong in my estimates, and if someone could prove this I should be very happy, because I like competition. But it seems to me that that competition is going to cost more, instead of doing what competition ought to do, which is to cost less.

MR. John warburton: Does Mr. Hobson feel that the extra cost in advertising, particularly in television, we are facing this year is justified?

the lecturer : People tend to approach this question as if it were an ethical one - that the television stations are charging too much, or too little. I do not feel it is an ethical problem at all, but a commercial one. There is undoubtedly an increase in the total volume of sets receiving I.T.V., and this, I think, would justify a reasonable 602




rise in the cost. But, much more important, the medium is still priced below the cost at which it is delivering an extremely valuable service. In other words, if people are going to buy time, as I am sure they will, at a higher cost, then I believe television stations are justified in raising their rates accordingly. This must be a supply and demand situation. It is just a question of what the traffic will bear, and I think the traffic will bear it.

MR. m. A. hallas {Evening News): Does Mr. Hobson agree with the system by which advertising agents obtain their income - that is, on commission from the media owners - or does he think there should be a service fee or some other system?

the lecturer: I made a thirty minute speech on this subject at a recent conference ! It is not an easy subject to deal with very briefly. I believe this is the right system for the advertising business, a strange business dealing in a very strange commodity. There is quality of service in the agency business which cannot be measured - it is creative, it is thoughtful approach, problem analysis, brainpower, it is even just watchfulness - intangible things which a client will value.

I do not believe you can approach this on any of the normal costing systems. We have had handed down to us in the advertising business a system which has the great merit of offering us a token independence of the people we advise - that is the clients - which is immensely good both for the clients and for the status of advertising. It is in a sense only a token independence, because we obviously act for them and at their expense; but, because we are not paid employees we have not got to go back cap-in-hand to them every time there is a change of budget or a change of plan in order to ask for more money, or to be told that we are going to get less money. All these things give us a greater independence and enable us to give them better advice than we would be able to if we were direct employees. At the same time, there is no doubt that we also give the media a lot of help of a different kind, and the fact that our remuneration is fixed by the media is another way of emphasizing the independence of the business. So we are neither directly subservient to the media nor directly subservient to the client, and I think this is in the best interests of both of them.

This is a strange kind of circumstance, in a very subjective sort of business, and I think that the system of agency commission which was handed down to us from an entirely irrelevant, separate set of circumstances is one way of preserving the situation at its best. Mind you, the system has been challenged all over the world, though I don't believe it has ever been cracked. People talk about the 'David Ogilvy system' as a change from the commission system, but if there were no commission system, David Ogilvy could not have achieved the particular basis of fees (which is exactly the same as commission but just based on an estimated year's budget) that he has achieved. And I am not sure, in any case, that even he would not admit that there is as much recrimination at the end of the year as there ever is on the commission system. I think the commission system has the great advantage of preserving an independence for the agency which is helpful to both the client and the media, and I do not believe, in spite of all the criticisms of it, that either side in its right mind would want to change it.

MR. L. в. seymour: Agents buy space as principals and resell to their clients at fixed prices. Is there any possibility that Retail Price Maintenance regulations might be extended to that system and enable them to sell space to their clients at any price they could get?

the lecturer: The Restrictive Practices Act excludes services at the moment, and as far as we can see it is likely to go on doing so. The Statute of Rome has very strict rules on this subject which, if we were in the Common Market, might provide considerable difficulties. I do not see anything in Resale Price Maintenance legisla-

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 964 tion that will apply in this particular case, but there could be other reasons why the agreements in the business came under some sort of extension of the Restrictive Practices Act. But for the moment we are bound, as to the price at which we sell our space, by the recognition agreements we have with the various publishing bodies.

miss D. c. macfadden: I wonder if Mr. Hobson would give us his views on the growth of bill posting and the future of the medium. I have been given the impression that it is growing in popularity and even taking some advertising away from other media.

the lecturer : I have not any up to date information about growth or otherwise. I believe myself that poster advertising has a very valuable part to play in the repetition process which is a fundamental part of advertising, but I can't see it growing out of proportion to other media. It may also suffer its own physical restric- tions because of legislation.

dr. R. D. hill, B.sc., PH.D., A.R.I.C., A.INST.M.S.M. : I should be grateful for Mr. Hobson's further comments on the use of computers in advertising. Is it not possible that, even when a computer has been competently programmed, because it necessarily employs statistics based on past events the help the computer gives in narrowing the breadth of decision-making is likely to be fraught with pitfalls, because of its inability to foresee fickle changes in purchasing motivations and human environment?

the lecturer: I would never expect computers to solve all our problems in advertising. As you say, there is a human element which constitutes a kind of a leap in the dark for all of us. The only thing is to try and make the leap as narrow as it can be. In a very large number of fields, although everyone is an individual, a collec- tion of individuals is still a statistic, you know, and the influences that work on us - the times at which we go to work in the mornings or go to bed at night, the food we eat, the things we read, the things we see - are all mass produced. They do in the end produce a lot of categories of people with common characteristics. Probably quite a lot of human behaviour that we have hitherto regarded as individual will be able to be patterned as being reasonably predictable.

I think that we shall be able to feed into computers quite a lot of the information that at the moment we cannot correlate - the distribution factors, for example, and preference factors. I think the first area in which computers will get to work is media.

the chairman: When I saw the title of tonight's lecture, I came here expecting to be blinded with arithmetic. In fact Mr. Hobson has dealt with his subject very lucidly indeed with comparatively little use of statistics, figures and tables. For some thirty years I spent my life swimming about among circulation figures and market research statistics and so on, and so I should like to express my personal thanks to Mr. Hobson for dealing with this subject with an absolute minimum of complicated tables and graphs. I should also like to thank him on behalf of all of you for having prepared three extremely good lectures.

The vote of thanks was carried with acclamation , and the meeting then ended.

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the influence and techniques of modern advertising

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