194 
THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
they can raise. Why? Because they have educated the consum¬ 
ing public to the necessity of buying walnuts. If that can be 
done in regard to fruit and walnuts, it seems to me you are very 
short sighted as business men if you do not wake up and see 
the possibilities there are before you. I am not saying that in 
any spirit of criticism, but because I am looking at it from an¬ 
other viewpoint. 
You are engaged in a business that is a beautiful business, a 
business that makes better men, not only of you who are en¬ 
gaged in it, but the general public as well, but you are not get¬ 
ting the outlet that you should get. And you will not get it en¬ 
tirely, gentlemen, by sending to the newspapers and magazines 
articles describing the beauties of planting shrubs and trees 
and things like that. You must make the people desire what 
you are raising, and in that connection you are in the same cate¬ 
gory as any manufacturer. You may not think so, but you are 
manufacturing these things after a certain fashion, and des¬ 
pite the co-operation of the wholesalers, and despite any co¬ 
operation you get in your own trade, you must reach the con¬ 
suming public. 
Now, your advertising, in the first place, I will say that lots 
of these articles that you are getting, are very good, they are 
fine, and the work should be followed, but there is something 
else that you should do, and that is to go to the people who 
would be the best buyers of the goods that you are raising. I do 
not believe in stopping those reading articles, I think they are 
excellent and I think you met with remarkable success at al¬ 
most no expense, practically nothing, but, gentlemen, you are 
advertising in publications, when you do it, at least it has been 
in publications like “Country Life,” “Country Gentleman” and 
the “Garden Magazine” and things like that, where the readers 
know all about your product. You do not go out and try to in¬ 
terest people who are not thinking of it. You do not go to the 
Chambers of Commerce, as you should, who are engaged in 
making their respective cities more beautiful, as the city of 
Grand Rapids did, in offering prizes for window boxes; you do 
not go to the factories that want to hide the unsightly portions 
of the plant with shrubs and vines. You do not tie up to the 
city plan men, city beautiful men, I do not know, but from what 
I know of the situation, I do not know that you have been tied 
up with the Forestry movement. You do not try to to set up 
competition between cities, as competition now exists between 
Portland and Tacoma. You do not take advantage of the fact 
that in Massachusetts 100,000 acres are going to be planted to 
white pine, and the same thing in other places. You do not 
take advantage of the fact that all over the country a million 
farm wood lots are not planted to the material that you could 
raise. 
I do not think you realize sufficiently that in view of the em¬ 
bargo that exists, that more stuff is going to be planted in this 
country, and that you are going to have more competition. 
Gentlemen, advertising will not do those things alone. While 
we have only spent $100,000 in the national advertising cam¬ 
paign of the Florists, we blanketed the country, we created an 
atmosphere, a desire on the part of the consumer and after all, 
without the appeal somewhere to the man who buys your trees 
and shrubs, your flowers and plants and things like that, with¬ 
out his desire and his purpose, all the wholesalers, retailers, 
commission men and everybody else engaged in any line of 
business, could not do much. They might for a while. We must 
go to these people and get hold of them. There are over a hun¬ 
dred million people in this country, lots of people to appeal to 
People are thinking more and more of the finer things; people 
are thinking of window boxes, more of homes, of their play¬ 
grounds today than ever before. There are possibilities there. 
The California Fruit Growers’ Association not only advertise 
in the magazines, but they go around to the retail dealer and 
get him to do more advertising, and Mr. Ammon, who is going 
to talk to you this morning, who is something of a statistician, 
will tell you the florists of this country have spent two and a 
half to three million dollars locally in different places, to back 
up the national campaign, and cash in on it, because they want 
to be identified with the slogan. 
Now, gentlemen, you may say my business is different from 
anything else. That it what we all think. We in our business 
think the same thing, but it is not, it is all a case of buying and 
selling, and the best definition I know of, of the word “adver¬ 
tising” is one that I like to quote, which is that advertising is 
the application of common sense to the solution of a selling 
problem. That applies to all kinds of business, and you have 
those possibilities, you have those opportunities. 
We, the advertising agency business, do not pretend to 
know everythng about every line of business that we are ad¬ 
vertising, but we find out all that we can. We make investiga¬ 
tions, we know the medium, we know the clientele of those 
mediums. We know conditions. We know that 40 per cent of 
the people in ten states in this country are illiterate, a great 
many do not speak the English language. We have to know 
the wage conditions, the industrial conditions, we have to study 
all that, you have not time to do it. If you had appendicitis and 
your appendix should be removed, you would not try to remove 
it yourself, but you would go to a man who made a study of 
that particular thing, and he would remove it for you. The same 
way with a lawyer. Why is it not common sense to go to an 
organization that has made a study of selling? If you have 
something to sell and the people want it, and it is only brought 
before them in the proper way, to my mind, gentlemen, it is very 
logical that you should advertise, but you should advertise in the 
right way, and I do not think you are ready for it now, that is, 
not when you talk about nursery advertising. 
I think, first of all, there should be an organization perfected 
that would look into the matter, that would see its possibilities, 
that would increase your membership, so that instead of 324, 
as you have, you would have 1500 members in this association; 
you would get them not only to be interested in the national 
campaign, but would show them how to do more business 
locally, so that you would get them tied up with national ad¬ 
vertising and interested in every local civic asssociatiou, which 
is so very easy to do, but I do not know, as far as I can under¬ 
stand, that much of that is being done. 
We have to study mediums. There are 2,300 publications to¬ 
day. We have got to know what the clientele of the New York 
Evening World is, what the papers in Oshkosh are doing, we 
have got to know what the Boston Transcript clientele is. Every 
time we take a medium that we should not take, we lose that 
much money for our clients, and it is our study of the proper 
selling, proper illustration to use that makes us of value to men 
in your business or any other line of business. Most people 
think that an advertising man—some advertising men like to 
have the claim made for them—they think an advertising man 
is a wonderful genius, with a special gift. All he needs to do 
is to sit down, dip his pen in ink andj dash off some sort of bril¬ 
liant thought that will electrify the world and bring a stream 
of customers to the business advertised. There are other people 
that think they can do advertising by simply putting it into the 
hands of an advertising man and leaving it there. The truth is 
that neither of these propositions is correct. Advertising is not 
merely advertising, not merely manufacturing, writing clever 
copy for distribution, but it is all these and in addition it is 
knowing all that you possibly can know of the articles, of the 
things that you are called upon to advertise, and by every means 
of ingenuity and stretch of imagination bringing those forces to¬ 
gether and then bringing about what you are striving for and 
that is the sale. 
But we do not stop there. I know of concerns that are ad- 
ertising today, they will pay 50c to $1.00 for the initial purchase 
and for an article, because they know the article is all that is 
claimed for it, they know that they are honest in their claim. 
That is simply an introduction. They think if they can make 
the initial sale that will create the buying and that creates good 
will. Do you think for a minute that if the Ivory Soap factory 
burned down tonight, that Ivory Soap would go out of busi¬ 
ness, or Lux, or Regal Shoes? No, the fire would be forgotten, 
the goods would sell just the same. People do not know about 
it, and why? Because the advertising has built up good will, it 
has built up prestige, the goods are all that is claimed for 
them, and if they are not, a man throws away every cent that 
he spends for advertising, if he is not truthful, he will not last. 
I know a case of a patent medicine that had a very successful 
year the first year. They spent something like $400,000, and at 
the end of the year they had distributed the article, at the end 
of the year they were $300 behind, after paying all the money 
for advertising and other cost involved in the putting out of the 
article. That aricle was not what was claimed for it, it did not 
do the work and the people stopped after using one bottle, and 
that money was thrown away. Suppose it was everything that 
was claimed for it, that it was what they advertised, people 
would have gone on buying it, and they would have built up a 
business. 
Gentlemen, it is unwise to go into advertising unless you go 
in to continue. You have got to have nerve to make the plunge. 
If you do not, it is unwise to go in. You know where we have a 
great many things that are familiar to you and me, that were 
familiar to us when we were younng; Soapine, Vegetins, Pear¬ 
line, and I could go down the line and name hundreds of articles 
that everybody was talking about, that were on the tip of every¬ 
body’s tongue. You do not hear very much about them today. 
Why? They thought they could stop adverisinng. Well, gentle¬ 
men, the public needs to be reminded as well as informed. The 
