Chapter 21 - Good Business (part 2)

A rapid stream ran by the writers boyhood home. The stream turned a wooden wheel and the wheel ran a mill. Under that primitive method, all but a fraction of the streams potentiality went to waste.

Then someone applied scientific methods to that stream - put in a turbine and dynamos. Now, with no more water, no more power, it runs a large manufacturing plant.

Then someone applied scientific methods to that stream - put in a turbine and dynamos. Now, with no more water, no more power, it runs a large manufacturing plant. We think of that steam when we see wasted advertising power. And we see it everywhere -hundreds of examples. Enormous potentialities - millions of circulation - used to turn a mill wheel. While others use that same power with manifold effect.

We see countless ads running year after year which we know to be unprofitable. Men spending five dollars to do what one dollar might do. Men getting back 30 percent of their cost when they might get 150 percent. And the facts could be easily proved.

We see wasted space, frivolity, clever conceits, entertainment. Costly pages filled with palaver which, if employed by a salesman, would reflect on his sanity. But those ads are always unkeyed. The money is spent blindly, merely to satisfy some advertising whim.

Not new advertisers only. Many an old advertiser has little or no idea of his advertising results. The business is growing through many efforts combined, and advertising is given its share of the credit.