Hoardings

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28153, 17 December 1956, Page 14

Hoardings

In these days when commercial firms are deeply conscious of the need to keep on good terms with the public—and often spend large sums to ensure that they do—the persistent disregard of public opinion by the firm that has erected a hoarding on Parapet Rock near Craigieburn is difficult to understand. It could be explained by a cynical belief that a trader who has long waiting lists for all the goods he has to sell can afford to defy public opinion. It is, more likely, the ordinary human reluctance to admit to making a mistake. But the motor firm should now be under no misapprehension about the seriousness of its miscalculation of public opinion; and, as a correspondent has suggested, the wisest course, when a mistake has been made, is to acknowledge it and rectify it without delay. The consequences of the mistake have already been serious enough; and they may yet be worse. The public must have found particularly distasteful the news that the firm had invoked the aid of the police to protect something that deeply offends the public’s sense of the fitness of things, and that the police, in the execution of this duty, had thought it necessary to warn respected and responsible citizens of the legal consequences of taking the law into their own hands. The firm, it must be acknowledged, is within its rights. It should reflect carefully before exercising them. The value of the sign must now, in any case, be questionable. While it remains it will be not so much a testimony to .commercial enterprise as a monument to the advertiser’s eoi.tempt for the wishes of the public he claims to serve.