BROADCASTING CONTROL

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 166, 16 July 1931, Page 20

BROADCASTING CONTROL

BRITISH AND AMERICAN.

SIR JOHN REITH'S VIEWS

RADIO AND ADVERTISING. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, June 10. "Radio as a means of advertising is no more a competitor of the newspaper than is the billboard. Both are what we call 'flash advertising'," said Mr. H. S. Gilmore, managing editor of the Detroit "News," addressing the National Advisory Council on radio in New York. "As an advertising medium, radio certainly has its limitations," he continued. "It cannot be used effectively except by an advertiser who profits by repeated mention of his name or the name of his product, and even then, if the radio exploitation of the name is followed by the specific sales message in the Press, it is doubly effective." Election returns, according to Mr. I Gilmore, are merely widening the field of the old-time newspaper window bulletin and the stereopticon. Declaring that sentiment in Great Britain is "utterly opposed" to a radio system of which advertising is the basis, Sir John Reith said he believed the broadcaster in the United States works "under an immense handicap," Sir John is the director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation. He explained that radio in is a monopoly under State aegis, but that the corporation itself is not a department of the State.. In ordinary matters of policy and in management, it is practically autonomous. /A licensing system and certain publishing activities furnish the revenue.

Commercialism, which is absent from the British system, entered radio in the United States because individualism and antipathy to Federal control aud taxation seemed to many to preclude the introduction of the European system, he said. The sponsored programme was "certainly not as unsatisfactory as it might be." Sir John Reith subsequently arrived in San Francisco and said the dream of the listeners of radio was a broadcast programme as varied and alluring as now heard in the United States, but without the incessant interference of the sales talker. Sir John, a tall, squareshouldered, aggressive-looking Briton, quite willing to tell the United States what he thought of it and its broadcast system, reached the Western metropolis in the course of a rapid tour of the! country. He emphatically reaffirmed the views he had expressed in the East. He thought American broadcasters work under an immense handicap by reason of their dependence upon advertising for support. British sentiment, after years of experience with the system of paying for programmes principally by license fees on receiving sets, is "utterly opposed," he said "to the American plan of indirect payment through purchase of advertised goods."

One interviewer in San Francisco, feeling confident American programmes have no peer in the world, asked Sir John what the British listeners would think of them. Sir John replied: "They would not like the advertising. Aside from the commercial features, the American programmes are excellent." He mentioned that in the British Isles about 3,500,000 receiving sets are licensed, the post office department seeing to it that every listener pays the little fee. Instead of making radio unpopular, the system has the effect of increasing the number of licenses 2500 j daily, with income of £1,250,000.