ADVERTISING NEW ZEALAND

Otago Witness, Issue 3885, 28 August 1928, Page 9

ADVERTISING NEW ZEALAND

POSTERS THAT MAKE THE EMPIRE “ COME ALIVE.” By Sir Lawrence Weaver, K.B.E. (President of the Design and Industries Association and of the Architecture Club of Great Britain.) (Illustrations In This Issue.) (Special for the Otago Witness.) A halo of suspicion used to cling to advertisement. The heads of wellestablished business houses connected it with quackery and boost. It might do, they agreed, for doubtful concerns to buttress themselves behind an entrenchment of posters and slogans. But goods worth buying would sell themselves on their merits. That contemptuous attitude towards advertisement has recently—and none too soon—died, at least in Great Britain. Banks, railway companies, and firms with decades of reputation behind them are all recognising that advertising in the -press and on hoardings is an indispensable agent of successful trade under modern commercial conditions. The British Government itself is employing advertisement as a means of carrying out one of the most important tests it has undertaken. In its deter- . mination to bring home to the people of Great Britain the significance of buying within the Empire it has placed large sums at the disposal of the official Empire Marketing Board to be spent on advertising. As this publicity campaign launched in favour of Empire buying is a unique State enterprise, and as New Zealand produce takes a prominent place in it, I believe that a brief account of. one aspect of it of which I am a close follower will interest readers of the Otago Witness. For nearly two years now the Empire Marketing Board has been displaying on special frames all over Great Britain posters devoted to scenes of production or to other aspects of importance in the Dominions. These posters have enjoyed unique advantages. Instead of having to take their turn on the hoardings among crowds of competitors, they have been set up on special oak frames in the centres of cities and towns. The first frame of all stands in Whitehall, London, opposite' the end of Downing street, where the Prime Minister lives, and it was visited on the day of its erection by the Prince of Wales. Nearly 300 towns outside London have been covered, about 90 new frames having gone up each month since the campaign began. The plan followed was of going first to towns with a population of 100,000 and over, then to those between 50,000 and 100,000, and so on down to country villages, which will eventually be tackled. In riiost cases the civic authorities have granted exclusive sites on municipal property to the Government for this broadcasting its messages of Empire. The posters are changed completely about once every three weeks, but their value does not end when they cease to be visible to millions of passers-by in the streets. For they are next reproduced in convenient wall size and issued with explanatory pamphlets to many thousand schools all over the country.

The effect of this continual appeal on the man in the street (and his wife) is powerful. The Empire is being made to “ come alive ” before his (or her) eyes in a novel and impressive way. One morning as he goes through his familiar home town he sees, perhaps, a scene on a New Zealand sheep farm reinforced by a reminder to buy New Zealand mutton and lamb. Next week the scene is changed, but the message

is the same. Again the importance of some phase of buying within the Empire is being made real and vivid.

This -would not be so unless the Empire Marketing Board had been zealous in its resolve to secure the cooperation of the ’best poster artists. Just as the most solid and well-estab-lished businesses now find that advertising is worth their while, so artists who in the past confined themselves to paintings have turned with keenness to posters. As a result the hoardings—which the. Prince of Wales called the poor man’s picture gallery—are getting more - and more pleasant, and the “E.M.8.” frames have kept up a particularly good level. Sometimes • the posters in them have struck one as being less effective than they might have been. But as a . rule they have scored a bull. Each set has done something to make the Empire come alive. Posters alone would not, in my opinion, be enough. I regard poster advertising or, as we generally call it in England, “ Outdoor Publicity ” as essentially “ reminder ” advertising to | be used as the “ E.M.8.” uses it to support reasoned argument in newspaper advertising. A publicity campaign that ignores the advertisement columns of the press commits suicide. But posters run side by side with newspaper advertising constitute a winning team.