Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/15

Rh For advertising's most effective influence must be upon the most impressionable part of our population—the young. The honest advertisers who shall be in business twenty years from now, therefore, are accumulating over and above their present profits a mighty self-compounding endowment fund in the impressions they are fastening upon the children who are soon to marry and buy for themselves.

But this circumstance, instead of discovering a cause for the industrial efficiency of advertising, only shows greater inherent strength in the other twentieth century circumstances which demand and make necessary and effective the great bulk of our modern advertising.

These bases cannot be other than the three which have given their character distinctively to the commercial and industrial development of the last fifty years—particularly to the last score.

These three pre-eminent characteristics which have distinguished the last years which have seen the greatest leaps in advertising expenditure are the fast growing specialization in production, the rapidly increasing speed with which commercial operations are now carried on and the greatly lengthening distance between the manufacturer and the market.