OCR Text |
Show WHY THEY ADVERTISE Newspapers of the United States carried $720,000,000 worth of ' advertising during the year 1925, according to William A. Thompson, director of the bureau of advertising of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association, who testified recently before the Federal Trade Commission. Of this amount $5 00,C'00,000 was spent in local advertising, the remaining $250,000,000 representing the amount spent in advertising of national circulation. These figures show something of the faith that the American business man has in the value of newspaper advertising. This form of publicity must pay, or the advertisers would not be spending three-quarters of a billion dollars annually on it. The keen business leaders of America do not put money in losing ventures. It is doubly significant that two-thirds of the great sum, a half billion dollars, went into the so-called local newspapers, while only one-third of the amount went into the national publications. Evidently it pays not only to advertise, but to advertise in your local newspaper. When we think of the value of the local newspaper, we usually measure; it in terms of its worth as a collector of news and a moulder of sentiment in the community. But the value of newspaper as an advertising medium is great, too, not only to the business man, but to the general public. It is through advertising advertis-ing in this local paper that the progressive merchant gets his goods before the people. And it is by reading the advertisements that the public learns where it can spend its money economically for reliable goods of the kind it wants. |