Music Trade Review

Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
V O L . L X . N o . 19
REVIEW
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman Bill at 373 Fourth Ave., New York, May 8, 1915
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Steady March
ERHAPS there is nothing which more clearly indicates the change for the better which has
taken place in business methods than modern advertising.
It does not require a great stretch of the imagination to recall the time when the sole
object of the average advertiser was to attract people to his store. To do this induce-
ments were offered that could not possibly be made good.
The statements made were grossly exaggerated and the advertising columns of the papers
published in all of the cities were filled with misleading statements.
All that is changed.
Read the newspapers to-day and you will find therein no announcements of such a char-
acter. Investigate any of the offerings that are now made and you wall find that the goods
that are advertised are just as they are described. The present-day merchant would no more
think' of fooling his customers by offering something that he could not deliver than he would
plan to short change them once he had persuaded them to visit his store. He knows that a
customer if lie has been pleased will come again, and it is permanency for which the merchant
is looking and not a transitory trade.
There are now and then instances wherein rules of honest advertising are seriously trans-
gressed, but happily they are greatly in the minority, for the square deal age has become more
and more a reality.
It will take time to clean up all of the factors which have a tendency to thwart honest
merchandising, but we are on the right track and are not liable to be diverted from the ultimate
aim of eliminating misstatements from the advertising columns of the papers.
Some of the prominent papers of to-day offer to be financially responsible for any proven
misstatements made by clients in their advertising columns.
In other words, they feel that they are responsible to their readers and they propose to pro-
tect them from fraudulent claims made in their columns.
Such a condition is really the result of constant advance along progressive lines in a national
sense.
The first move in that direction was the elimination of objectionable and questionable adver-
tising of various kinds. Then next, the publisher felt that he was responsible to his readers for
statements made in his columns.
That is certainly going some. It is precisely in harmony with the development ol things
for the better.
.
During the last ten years there has been almost a revolution in this respect.
Formerly selfishness dominated in the business and commercial world. To succeed it was not
against the laws of commercial warfare for a man to ride roughshod over his competitors. He
would play the most unfair tricks if his own ends were fostered thereby.
Of course, the method of fighting business battles still exists, but they are being fought along
fairer lines, and soon falsehood and misrepresentation must cease.
...
It takes a long time to bring about any great reform in methods or principles, but the refor-
mation is well under way and the spirit underlying it is far stronger than many persons imagine.
It must be admitted that great betterments have taken place in music trade advertising. It is
P
(Continued on page 5.)