The “good old days” had much that was quaint — and much that we would laugh at today. Ask your grandmother to tell you something about the “good old days” — about a shopping trip, for instance.
She’ll recall how she trudged to the store with a basket of eggs. How she traded them for barrel sugar and whole-bean coffee. She can tell you about Shiftless Joe who could squirt “tobaccy juice” 10 feet to the sawdust box around the pot-bellied stove… and about the cat that slept in the cracker barrel!
Would you want to buy the family food from the old cracker-barrel store?
Answer that question for yourself next time someone tells you that advertising is costing the American household millions of dollars a year. Answer it with careful deliberation, remembering that without national distribution, made possible by advertising, modern stores and tested goods in sanitary packages would no longer be sold. As sure as a cat slept in a cracker barrel, we’d be back in the “good old days.”
How about the cost of advertising? Actually advertising costs only a small fraction, often only 1/50 cent, on an article.
That, however, is not the way to judge advertising cost. What of the cost of advertising as long as the goods we buy cost less? And it is a fact that most of the pure, clean, high-quality foods of today cost less than the unbranded, doubtful-value goods of yesteryear.
UPHOLD AMERICAN STANDARDS
…BUY ADVERTISED BRANDS
This is one of a series of advertisements prepared by the Advertising Club of St. Louis, showing consumer benefits gained through advertising.
If it can be sold, an Intelligencer want ad will sell it.
Taken from the Edwardsville Intelligencer. Edwardsville, Illinois. November 1, 1939.
