Address to the Association of National Advertisers.

IT GIVES ME great pleasure to extend greetings to you upon your assembly in Washington. Advertising is one of the vital organs of our entire economic and social system. It certainly is the vocal organ by which industry sings its songs of beguilement. The purpose of advertising is to create desire, and from the torments of desire there at once emerges additional demand and from demand you pull upon increasing production and distribution. By the stimulants of advertising which you administer you have stirred the lethargy of the old law of supply and demand until you have transformed cottage industries into mass production. From enlarged diffusion of articles and services you cheapen costs and thereby you are a part of the dynamic force which creates higher standards of living.

You also contribute to hurry up the general use of every discovery in science and every invention in industry. It probably required a thousand years to spread the knowledge and application of that great human invention, the wheeled cart, and it has taken you only 20 years to make the automobile the universal tool of man. Moreover, your constant exploitation of every improvement in every article and service spreads a restless pillow for every competitor and drives the producer to feverish exertions in new invention, new service, and still more improvement. Incidentally, you make possible the vast distribution of information, of good cheer and tribulation which comes with the morning paper, the periodical, and the radio. And your contributions to them aids to sustain a great army of authors and artists who could not otherwise join in the standards of living you create.

Your latest contribution to constructive joy is to make possible the hourly spread of music, entertainment, and political assertion to the radio sets in 12 million homes.

At one time advertising was perhaps looked upon as an intrusion, a clamor to the credulous. But your subtlety and beguiling methods have long since overcome this resentment. From all of which the public has ceased to deny the usefulness of advertising and has come to include you in the things we bear in life.

But in more serious turn, the very importance of the position which advertising has risen to occupy in the economic system is in direct proportion to the ability of the people to depend upon the probity of the statements you present. The advertising executive and the medium through which he advertises must see to it that the desire you create is satisfied by the article recommended. The good will of the public toward the producer, the goods, or the service is the essential of sound advertising-for no business succeeds upon the sale of an article once. And to maintain this confidence of the public you and the mediums which you patronize have an interest that others do not violate confidence and thereby discredit the whole of advertising.

You have recognized that responsibility. The Better Business Bureau and the vigilance agencies which you have set up to safeguard the general reputation of advertising are not only sound ethics but sound business. In the policing of your own business you are contributing soundly to self-government by curing abuse without the interference of government. I wish you success in your convention and in the purposes for which you are assembled.