184 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



admit that horse racing is one of the big acts if you want to run a fair. 

 You can run it as square as you can and yet you will have them changing 

 money in the quarter-stretch — you will surely have them changing money 

 a little bit. 



Next year is going to be a year that may be a little hard, we cannot 

 tell; it depends upon what the land is going to do, whether it is going 

 to come down or stand still; but the main thing is to plan good stuff and 

 pay the price for it, and charge the people for it, and they will thank you. 



That is all I have to say, gentlemen. Thank you! (Applause.) 



The President : The next topic is Publicity, led by Ray P. Speer, 

 who is publicity manager of the Minnesota State Fair, and also man- 

 ager of the Cooperative Publicity Bureau. Mr. Speer. 



Ray P. Speer, Publicity Manager Minnesota State Fair. 

 Gentlemen: 



The meeting is drawing to a close, and I am not going to bore you very 

 long. I am going to make about three points and quit. In the first 

 place, I think it can be taken as an axiomatic principle that everybody be- 

 lieves in publicity. I don't think it is necessary to stand up in front of 

 a fair managers' meeting and try to prove that publicity is a good thing. 

 I don't think there is anybody who will contradict it. The big question 

 is. How are you going to get your publicity? and What kind of publicity 

 are you going to use? In the first place, I think that a great deal can be 

 said as to how you are going to get your publicity. When we start getting 

 away from the point that publicity is good, then the average fair man 

 commences to get into trouble. Now, in the first place, I am absolutely 

 convinced that practically every fair in existence does not organize 

 properly to get its publicity. The difficulty is that fundamentally the 

 fair man's conception of publicity is entirely different from what it ought 

 to be. The average successful business concern realizes that there are 

 two branches of the business, one just as influential and one just as worth- 

 while as the other. He realizes that there is a production or a manufac- 

 turing end to his business, and in the second place he realizes that there 

 is a salesmanship end to his business. Practically every fair in the coun- 

 try believes, as far as practice is concerned, that there is only one branch 

 of the business — that is the production end. The average successful 

 business concern has a man, a president and business manager, or what- 

 ever you may term him or call him, at the head of the concern, whose 

 duty it is to run the business. Generally he is the big stockholder in the 

 concern; he is the man who owns most of the business; he controls the 

 business and runs it. Now, as I said before, there are two branches of 

 organization — one of them is the manufacturing or production end, and 

 the other is the sales end. Now, the president doesn't give any greater, 

 or attach any greater, importance to the one than he does to the other. As 

 a matter of fact, after his business becomes standardized and his prob- 

 lems of production become settled, the big end is not his production end 

 but his sales end. That is the thing that bothers him more than his pro- 

 duction end. The production end, although that is his biggest problem at 

 the early part of his business, later becomes the lesser, because they 



