POST OFFICE EXPANSION

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22143, 13 July 1937, Page 12

POST OFFICE EXPANSION

EFFICACY OF NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING

BRITISH MINISTER’S TRIBUTE (froji oua owjf coßßiarojrpKjrr.) LONDON, June 16. Mr G. C. Tryon, the PostmasterGeneral, paid a tribute to the part played by press advertising in the rapid expansion of Post Office business when he addressed the Empire Advertising Convention at Brighton. Referring to his £.35,000,000 telephone development scheme, he said: •We should not have developed on that huge scale if it had not been for very active publicity and help from the press. Newspaper advertising has always been one of the main sources of the help we get. Judged by results it has always paid.” The Postmaster-General spoke of the services which publicity has given to the Post Office. He said that to-day the Post Office was organised and conducted in niany respects like any large industrial enterprise. Efficient public service was the mainspring of the policy, and constituted the primary consideration. The Post Office cotucl serve the public efficiently only if public requirements were known and if the liaison with its customers was sufficiently intimate to inspire their goodwill and co-operation. The Post Office had adopted all the methods of modern publicity practice in explaining itself to the public; newspaper advertising, posters, exhibitions, direct mail, and films had all been used. Press advertising continued to be a main and effective plank in their programme. Judged by results it had amply repaid them. It was confined first to the telephone service, but had now been employed for other branches of Post Office activities.

They had recently been running a “post-early” campaign in the national and provincial press. The “post-early” advertising had aroused much interest, and many business firms had let him know that they had adopted earlier posting with advantage. At the end of June they would begin a further newspaper advertising campaign for the inauguration of the first part of the Empire air mail scheme. The first stage of this ambitious Imperial project, which had been devised to provide improved, accelerated, and more frequent services on the Empire air routes between this country, South Africa, India, Malaya, Australia, and, eventually, New Zealand, would be launched towards the end of this month, when all first-class mail "would be carried to East Africa and South Africa at a charge of lid a halfounce. There would be three dispatches each week to East Africa and two each week to South Africa compared with the present weekly service by land and sea. The surcharges on air mails to AngloEgyptian Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika Territory, Zanzibar, Mauritius, Nyasaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa would cease when the new service began. All letters and postcards would go by air, but they would no longer need air mail labels.

Had their policy justified itself? Of that there could be no doubt, he said. Never before in the history of the Post Office had the relations between its staff and the public been on so friendly a basis. The use of advertising both for telegrams and telephones had considerably increased the public response to the various reductions in charges which they had been able to make. With the aid of advertising, telephone development had made unprecedented progress. During the last 12 months more than 250,000 telephones were installed, a figure never previously approached in the history of the telephone in this country.