Advertising​—How Necessary?

THE blue peacock of India displays a sudden, glorious blaze of color. Feathers, five times the length of his body, resplendent with eyelike markings, rise from his back to stand shimmering in the sunlight. A majestic sight, he slowly parades in front of his prospective mate, the peahen. How could she possibly resist what has been described as “the most magnificent . . . advertisement in the world”? Advertising is a worldwide phenomenon. Our series examines its motivation and its effects, as seen by Awake! correspondent in Britain.

Basically, what is advertising? It is the action of making something known. In nature it is often essential for the preservation and propagation of life.

Howling wolves, for example, advertise their presence to avoid unnecessary encounters with other packs as each searches for food. A female moth can detect a few molecules of a pheromone, a chemical substance, released many miles away by a male of her own species that is advertising for a mate. Predators wisely avoid the cinnabar caterpillar, whose vivid yellow and black stripes advertise that it is not just distasteful but toxic.

What of us humans? We have gone a step further and commercialized the art of advertising. Consider a few examples.

Commercial Advertising

An Egyptian papyrus discovered at Thebes is perhaps the oldest commercial advertisement in existence. Written over three thousand years ago, it advertised a reward for the return of a runaway slave.

The public criers of ancient Greece, later identified with the town criers of European cities, were in effect mobile publicity men, attracting attention to their proclamations.

In medieval England, the symbol of three hanging golden balls, drawn from the coat of arms of the Italian Medici family of financiers, advertised moneylenders. Today, that same sign survives to identify a pawnbroker’s shop.

Over 250 years ago, London’s Dr. Samuel Johnson complained: “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused. . . . The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement.” But since then, how things have changed! In the last 50 years, the trade has mushroomed into an industry.

Advertising is big business now, very big. Newspapers, billboards, glossy magazine pages, neon lights, radio and television commercials​—all vie for our attention in a constant bombardment of persuasion, sometimes blatant and at other times amazingly clever and subtle.

The high-pitched drone of modern airships draws our gaze to enormous floating advertisements. Smaller aircraft trail slogans across the sky. The diversification seems endless! But is it really necessary?

How does advertising work? If there was less of it, would we, the consumers, be better​—or worse—​off? What part can it play in our lives?

Advertising​—The Powerful Persuader

ADVERTISING fulfills a need that can be traced back for as long as men have bought and sold. It is an art that has developed over the years.

Modern advertising really took off after World War II. The industrial growth and boom of the 1950’s spilled over into the 1960’s. ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ said Harold Macmillan, Britain’s prime minister at the time. His observation seemed to prove true.

Affluence meant greater purchasing power, which led to more production and the need for increased sales. The circle of supply and demand was complete, all revolving around the hub​—advertising.

Today, selling is an art caught up in the proliferation of credit cards​—22.6 million are in daily use in Britain, the country with the largest number in Europe.

At the turn of the century, space in newspapers and magazines was sold to clients who simply filled it with the basic fact that they had a product to sell. “Cameras by Eastman Kodak” illustrates this. A hundred years ago, Kodak’s annual bill for magazine advertising in the United States came to $350! But now in the United States, more than this amount is spent on commercial advertising per person, per year!

The United States is the undisputed home of modern advertising. Since the second world war, most Western nations have followed its lead, and developing countries are now following suit. Multinational corporations help as they spread their influence.

Advertising is not only big business but also a high-powered industry​—some even call it a science. In any event, it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid its intrusions into our lives. Wherever we look, whatever we do, advertising is ahead of us, there to greet us. It cajoles, it implores, it reasons, it shouts. Whether consciously or subconsciously, all of us are affected, for better or for worse, by advertising.

Who owns and runs this powerful and persuasive commercial machine? How does it work?

How Do You Place an Advertisement?

If you want to insert an advertisement in your local newspaper, it is easy enough to telephone the newspaper office. But placing an advertisement on television or country-wide on billboards is another proposition. For that, you need the services of an advertising agency. Around the world there are now many from which to choose, but we should look first at New York’s Madison Avenue, Ad Alley as it is often called, where the first agencies sprang up.

Rosser Reeves revolutionized the advertising industry’s techniques in 1954, about ten years after he had helped to launch and develop Ted Bates & Company in Ad Alley. From a small beginning, he built a globe-encircling agency in 50 countries, worth $3 billion in 1984. Other entrepreneurs followed suit, to amass fortunes as the industry entered its postwar boom.

Until five years ago, most British advertising firms were United States subsidiaries, but that is no longer true. When Britain’s Saatchi & Saatchi purchased Ted Bates & Company in 1986, it became the world’s largest advertising agency. Even so, the United States still accounts for more than half the total amount of money the world spends annually on advertising.

What kind of figure are we talking about? No less than $150 billion a year, from which, according to The Economist, advertising-agency commissions come close to $23 billion.

But the real power of advertising does not lie with the money. As Bill Bernbach, one of Madison Avenue’s greatest innovators, put it: “All of us who use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can elevate it.” Therein lies advertising’s awesome power. Just how responsibly is it wielded?

The “Hard Sell”

“Hard sell,” according to Britain’s Advertising Association, is “punchy, persuasive, high-pressure advertising.” But the American definition, “aggressive high-pressure salesmanship,” may be more pointed. It is the complete antithesis of the “gentle persuasion” of the “soft sell.” What is involved, and how does it affect us?

When a market nears the saturation point, aggressive salesmanship takes over as manufacturers fight to keep or extend their share of it. In many Western countries, cars, television sets, and like commodities are now experiencing the hard sell in the face of overcapacity.

An interesting medical situation exists in the United States that illustrates the motive behind high-pressure advertising. “Hospitals Learn the Hard Sell,” headlined Time magazine. Faced as hospitals are with an increase in the number of empty beds and in competition between hospitals and clinics, aggressive advertising is taking over. One California medical center advertisement asks: “Kidney Stones? Who Ya Gotta Call . . . Stonebusters!”

One of the problems with the hard sell, however, is that it is often difficult to fight against it. The power of persuasion may become so great that we may be coerced into buying something we do not need or into doing something not in our best interests. Let us take two well-known examples.

Bottle-Feeding Versus Breast-Feeding

The World Health Organization’s code of practice now prohibits the distribution of free dried-milk samples to mothers. Its aim is to safeguard breast-feeding because breast milk contains antibodies that help to protect against disease. It also suppresses ovulation, acting as a form of contraception, and that is helpful in countries where other forms of birth control are not available.

The recent distribution of such samples in some of Britain’s National Health hospitals brought back a flood of memories and fears. The results of a five-year survey in Liverpool, England, revealed that “mothers don’t understand the instructions on the labels [of artificial milk feeds] and the bottles and teats are kept in unhygienic conditions.” Researcher Dr. A. J. H. Stephens added fairly: “Breast-milk substitutes are quite safe provided they are mixed correctly and hygienically.” [Italics ours.] But problems abound when they are not.

In 1983 a shocking report in Africa Now revealed that an estimated ten million cases of infectious disease and infant malnutrition each year were caused by bottle-feeding. Earlier, in 1974, the charity War on Want had claimed that in developing countries a million babies a year died as a result of powdered-milk sales. The reason? “Aggressive marketing and promotion of breast-milk substitutes,” reported Africa Now.

The Observer delineated the tragedy for those who lacked the ability to cope with the necessary hygienic requirements in preparing such feeds: “The weight of evidence from poor countries [is] that advertising was persuading poorly educated mothers that milk substitutes are as good as breast milk, and that babies were dying as a result of poor sterilisation of bottles.” In some cases, after receiving free samples, mothers could not afford to buy the product. By that time their breast milk had dried up. That hard sell had a tragic outcome.

The Tobacco Harvest

In the 1980’s, so successful is cigarette advertising to women in Britain that despite acknowledged health-risk factors, smoking among women has dropped by only a fifth in the past 15 years, compared with a drop of one third for men.a As a result, “lung cancer is now killing nearly as many women as breast cancer, and more and more women are suffering from ‘male’ diseases of the heart and chest,” reports London’s The Sunday Times.

Britain’s Health Education Council is greatly concerned, but what can it do on an advertising budget of £1.5 million compared with the tobacco industry’s £100 million?

One idea is to curb tobacco advertising. Some countries have already imposed a total ban​—Norway in 1975, neighboring Finland three years later, and the Sudan in 1983, for example. In many other lands, such as West Germany, the United States, and the Republic of South Africa, pressure groups are persistently lobbying for additional restrictions on cigarette advertising.

But in Britain, where cigarette manufacturers trade in a “struggling market,” the hard sell continues in printed form, particularly in women’s magazines. Why there? Simply because “women form an extremely lucrative source of income,” observes The Sunday Times. When an advertiser is employed to sell a commodity, morality does not necessarily come into it.

Advertising’s Use of Sports

It is logical for manufacturers to sponsor sports with which they are connected​—tires and petrol in motor racing, for instance. But how do tobacco companies get involved in such promotions, to the tune of £8.2 million in Britain in 1985? “Sport is supposed to make people healthy and smoking makes them ill,” observed one Member of Parliament, “so tobacco sponsorship is irreconcilable with the idea of promoting healthy living through sport.” Yet such promotions are profitable investments. Consider why.

First of all, there is the immediate association of a sporting event with an advertised brand name, but that is only the beginning. By means of large signs, skillfully put around the place where the events are being televised, cigarette advertisements can appear on millions of television screens, and the tobacco companies are not paying a penny for the privilege. In this way they also circumvent the 20-year-old ban placed on all television tobacco advertising in the United Kingdom.

In 1982 an estimated 350 million viewers in 90 countries saw Martina Navratilova win the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championship wearing an outfit of the same colors as a popular cigarette packet. “It’s got nothing to do with cigarettes. Who’s worrying anyway?” was the response of one of the promoters, in the face of BBC Television protests. More stringent restrictions have been imposed to meet this kind of sporting challenge, but it is not easy to keep ahead of such subtle persuasion.

Positive Persuasion

Advertising can generate work and stimulate an economy​—welcome contributions to society. Advertising can even create a market where no market exists. Consider the impact of diamonds in Japan.

Unlike the Western world where a diamond engagement ring is the usual culmination of a successful courtship, Japanese society is built on different customs. In 1968 less than 5 percent of Japanese women received an engagement ring. But a campaign to promote diamonds started that year, and as a result, 60 percent of Japanese brides were wearing diamonds by 1981. “In a mere 13 years, the 1,500 year Japanese tradition was radically revised,” commented E. J. Epstein in his book The Diamond Invention. Such is advertising’s power of persuasion.

Advertising can also be employed to alert people to danger. In 1986 the British government appointed a London advertising agency to warn the country of the serious threat posed by AIDS. Every home in the country received a free leaflet, augmented by advertisements on radio and television, and in newspapers and magazines.

But the greatest record of effective publicity traces back nearly two thousand years, to those first intrepid followers of Jesus Christ. Do you know just how skilled those early Christians were at advertising? It is an intriguing story.

[Footnotes]

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What Sells the Ad?

MODERN advertising is expensive. Television commercials may cost tens of thousands of dollars, as may extensive newspaper and magazine spreads. Will people read them? Will they remember them? Will they act upon them? To ensure that they do, science now plays an increasingly important role in advertisement preparation. Eye-tracking equipment, monitoring viewers’ eyes by means of infrared beams, quickly reveals which part of the prepared layout is catching the most attention. But even then, sales must rest on stimulating the desire to buy. Psychophysiologists say they have the answer as they check the brain’s reaction. But the simple fact remains: “The more likable a TV commercial is, the more persuasive it will be,” reports the Ogilvy Center for Research & Development.

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Advertising made a huge difference in the sale of diamond rings in Japan

Advertising​—Christianity’s Powerful Weapon

FOLLOWING the death of Jesus Christ, the first Christians were scattered and persecuted. Explains Professor K. S. Latourette in his History of Christianity: “Because they refused to participate in pagan ceremonies the Christians were dubbed atheists. Through their abstention from . . . the pagan festivals, the public amusements which to Christians were shot through and through with pagan beliefs, practices, and immoralities​—they were derided as haters of the human race.”

That Christianity should have survived and expanded around the then known world in the face of such opposition is quite extraordinary. How was it possible? Part of the secret rested on preaching or publicity!

Describing Jesus’ work as a persuasive preacher and teacher, Professor C. J. Cadoux writes in The Early Church and the World: “The work of persuasion had to be carried on by means both of words and of deeds. There was bound, therefore, to be much publicity in his life and teaching. . . . A good deal of his early teaching​—as well as that of his disciples—​was delivered in public.” Commenting further on the activity of the disciples after Jesus’ death, Cadoux continues: “Publicity is courted. The witnesses deliver their testimony with outspoken frankness.”

What kind of people are we talking about? Explains Edmond de Pressensé in The Early Years of Christianity: “The teaching . . . was an unstudied speech, springing from the heart. The Apostles were not the only speakers; the other Christians spoke as freely as they of the wonderful works of God.” Christians were their own publicity agents, all of them eagerly sharing their faith with others in their public preaching and teaching work.

Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, points out that “the public highways, which had been constructed for the use of the [Roman] legions, opened an easy passage for the Christian missionaries from Damascus to Corinth, and from Italy to the extremity of Spain or Britain.” Gibbon adds: “There is the strongest reason to believe that before the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine the faith of Christ had been preached in every province, and in all the great cities of the empire.”

To propagate their faith, the Christians exploited every means available. As Bible translator Edgar Goodspeed reveals in his book Christianity Goes to Press: “They were to an unusual extent a book-buying and book-reading people. They were also a translating and publishing people. . . . [In 140 C.E.] Christian publishers . . . resorted to the leaf-book form, the codex, and found it so practical . . . and convenient that it became their characteristic book form.”

20th-Century Advertising

Today, Jehovah’s Witnesses are just as zealous and active as their first-century counterparts were in publicizing the Christian faith throughout the world​—and in using modern technology. Consider the following 20th-century highlights:

● 1914. “Photo-Drama of Creation.” This drama consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The project was one of the pioneers in the field of sound motion pictures.

● 1920. “Millions Now Living Will Never Die.” Over a two-year period, billboards and newspapers, along with an extensive personal advertising campaign worldwide, heralded this popular lecture and subsequent booklet.

● 1922. “Advertise the King and Kingdom.” This was the challenging theme of the Cedar Point, Ohio, convention. The exhortation to “advertise, advertise, advertise, the King and his Kingdom” set the pace for Jehovah’s Witnesses as personal publicity agents from that time on.

● 1924. WBBR, Watch Tower Society’s radio station. Built to take advantage of early radio transmission. By 1933, the peak year, a network of 408 stations was being used by Jehovah’s Witnesses to advertise the Bible’s message on six continents.

● 1934. Portable phonographs and 78-rpm records. For ten years Jehovah’s Witnesses used this then up-to-date method of communication, manufacturing some 20,000 phonographs to meet the demand.

A Mighty Final Witness!

As World War II drew to its close in 1945, Jehovah’s Witnesses were poised to enter the field of preaching to an unprecedented extent. Jesus said that with faith his followers would “do works greater” than those he had performed. This would be in the extent of their preaching. How true this prophecy has proved to be!​—John 14:12.

In the year 1987, some three million four hundred thousand Witnesses in 210 countries spent over 700 million hours preaching and teaching. “Whatever part of the world you live in, it is difficult not to meet Jehovah’s Witnesses,” notes Church of England cleric Jack Roundhill, adding: “They carry out their witness in market-places and from public platforms and wherever they can find an audience. But the characteristic method of the Witnesses is to take their message right into the house of anyone who will let them in. Often they get no further than the doorstep, and if so, they will use the doorstep as their pulpit.”

Advertising by word of mouth pays a rich dividend, with over 230,000 new Witnesses being baptized during the course of the year. For the annual Memorial celebration of the death of Jesus Christ, they attracted nearly nine million people to their Kingdom Halls.

From their many printing plants around the world, millions of books, booklets, and tracts pour forth in a steadily increasing stream, in over 200 languages. The Watchtower and Awake! are the most widely circulated religious magazines in the world today, having a combined circulation of 46 million copies a month. But they have never contained commercial advertising. And one of the Witnesses’ hardbound books, The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life, has a circulation of over 106 million in 116 languages! The circulation of others of their Bible-based books numbers into the tens of millions each.

Yes, Jehovah’s Witnesses are well prepared to advertise the King and his Kingdom, the righteous government soon to take over man’s affairs. With such motivation, their enthusiastic advertising is indeed a powerful Christian weapon!

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Phonographs were used for preaching

In its day, the Photo-Drama advertising drew large audiences

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Witnesses now preach in over 200 lands

In some 54,000 congregations, Witnesses publicize God’s Kingdom

Worldwide, hundreds of millions of Bible publications, in some 200 languages, come off presses like this one