Advertising as a business force
a compilation of experience records
The purpose of this book is to provide a test for the individual instruction work for the Educational Committee of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America. Throughout the work of compilation, we shall endeavour to keep strictly to this purpose. In the selection of experience records, it will be our aim to make our choices primarily with this object in mind.
In a choice between two articles of equal value, the availability of one or the other for individual instruction purposes will lead to its selection. If the book, in addition to being useful for this individual instruction work, serves to put before advertisers, in a somewhat new light, a material with which they are already familiar, we shall be glad that its usefulness may be thus extended.
Again, if the compilation of these experience records serves to preserve from disappearance, in the files of the publications in which they appeared, some extremely valuable material covering the development of advertising during the last few years, we shall be glad that its usefulness has been enhanced by that service also. The plan of the book embraces the selection of records of experience showing how advertising activities have been related to the selling results they were designed to produce.
These experience records will be compiled under a few general headings corresponding with chapter divisions, and these general headings will be arranged in two main groups. The first of these groups will discuss the organization of the distribution system for handling goods sold ultimately at retail and will discuss the advertising aspects of the successive steps in this system. Some attention also will be given to the changes in the distribution system and the advertising aspects of the new conditions resulting from these changes.
The second group of chapters will be devoted to a discussion of present-day advertising problems and methods. The plan for the compilation provides for comparatively little constructive interpretation on the part of the compiler of the quotations selected. We shall aim to make the quotations tell their own story as far as possible.
We believe that what we sacrifice in this way, in the matter of unity, we shall gain in the preservation of freshness and variety of viewpoints — to say nothing of the preservation of the air of authority which can only come from a much wider range of knowledge than any one person can possess.
We wish to express our thanks to those who have so liberally assisted us in making this compilation. John Irving Romer, editor of Printers' _ Ink, Le Roy Fairman, editor of Advertising and Selling, and D. V. Casey, managing editor of System, we wish to especially thank you for their cordial co-operation in giving us access to their files, and we wish to thank the proprietors of each of these magazines for permission to use the material which they have published.
We wish, also, to acknowledge our appreciation of the extremely cordial co-operation which we have received in all matters from Chairman Herbert S. Houston of the Educational Committee, and from the members of the committee, who have from time to time examined the work while it was in progress and have been of great assistance with their frank criticisms and valuable suggestions.
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