Advertisers' Advertiser

Fifty years ago, when the biggest national advertisers were patent-medicine manufacturers and an annual appropriation of $100,000 was regarded as a breath-taking extravagance, George Presbury Rowell started publishing a pocket-size semimonthly journal for advertisers, gave it the chaste title Printers' Ink. U. S. business was feeling the faint stirrings of the machine age. Advertising was destined to become the midwife for mass distribution and Printers' Ink soon became a handmaid for advertisers. Today, Printers' Ink, still pocket-size, is a weekly with 17,803 subscribers who spend nearly all of the nation's annual $1,768,000,000 na tional advertising budget. This week it marked its golden anniversary with a 472-page special edition summarizing the development of U. S. business as it was recorded in P. I.'s 2,571 preceding issues.

Strictly as a trade journal, P. I. has served its industry well.* It has carefully reported and assayed every simple or fantastic scheme to get the U. S. consumer to buy something. It has evolved statistical summaries of the status of advertising. It maintains a clearinghouse for advertising slogans, now has 7,500 on file. Its Readers' Service answers 300 questions a week, provides P. I.'s editors with an insight into the problems of advertisers. To the irrepressible, sometimes irresponsible, advertiser, P. I. has been a fond but strict mother. At the instigation of John Irving Romer, editor of P. I. from 1908 until his death in 1933, a model statute, making untrue or misleading advertising a mis demeanor, was drawn up in 1911. Today the model is law in 25 States.

But P. I.'s most notable editorial dis tinction embraces a wider scope. With unabashed possessiveness, P. I. has labeled the modern U. S. business world "the advertiser system." The essential of this system is a realization of the community of interest between capital and labor. In practical terms this would mean an unfailing flow of purchasing power to the consumer which would enable him to buy the goods of mass production. In its first issue, July 15, 1888, P. I. insisted on the "mutuality of dependence'' between capital and labor which "cannot be put to mutually beneficial use unless there is at least an approximation to equality in their respective situations." In its May 26, 1938 issue, P. I. was still following the same line: "If either capital or labor goes down it will pull the other with it. ... It would help mightily at this critical stage if certain reactionary capitalists would remember that capitalism is not their individual possession."

Concretely, P. I.'s interpretation of "the advertiser system" has meant consistent advocacy of higher wages as a means of maintaining purchasing power. Most enthusiastic proponent of this view is tall, alert Clinton Roy Dickinson, president of Printers' Ink Publishing Co., Inc., author of two books and numerous short stories. In 1921 Author Dickinson served as a member of the unemployment conference called by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, was the lone supporter of the late A. F. of L. President Samuel Gompers in a minority report opposing wage reductions. Publisher Dickinson believes he would not be alone today.

*In 1919, the illustrated Printers' Ink Monthly was started.

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