There is one industry in the world which may be called, more than any other, a socializing factor in our modern life. The industry of advertising binds men together and tightly knits the members of society into one compact mass. Every one in the big market-place of civilization has his demands and has some supply. But in order to link supply and demand, the offering must be known. The industry which overcomes the isolation of man with his wishes and with his wares lays the real foundation of the social structure. It is not surprising that it has taken gigantic dimensions and that uncounted millions are turning the wheels of the advertising factory. The influence and civilizing power of the means of propaganda go far beyond the help in the direct exchange of goods. The advertiser makes the modern newspaper and magazine possible. These mightiest agencies of public opinion and intellectual culture are supported, and their technical perfection secured, by those who pay their business tax in the form of advertisements.

Under these circumstances it would appear natural to have just as much interest and energy and incessant thought devoted to this very great and significant industry as to any branch of manufacturing. But the opposite is true. Armies of engineers and of scientifically trained workers have put half a century of scholarly research and experimental investigation into the perfecting of the physical and chemical industries. The most thorough study is devoted to the raw material and to the machines, to the functions of the workingman and to everything which improves the mechanical output. In striking contrast to this, the gigantic industry of advertising is to-day still controlled essentially by an amateurish impressionism, by a so-called commonsense, which is nothing but the uncritical following of a well-worn path. Surely there is an abundance of clever advertisement writers at work, and great establishments make some careful tests before they throw their millions of circulars before the public. Yet even their so-called tests have in no way scientific character. They are simply based on watching the success in practical life, and the success is gained by instinct. Commonsense tells even the most superficial advertiser that a large announcement will pay more than a small one, an advertisement in a paper with a large circulation more than in a paper with a few subscribers, one with a humorous or emotional or exciting text more than one with a tiresome and stale text. He also knows that the cover page in a magazine is worth more than the inner pages, that a picture draws attention, that a repeated insertion helps better than a lonely one. Yet even a score of such rules would not remove the scheme of advertising from the commonplaces of the trade. They still would not show any trace of the fact that the methods of exact measurement and of laboratory research can be applied to such problems of human society.

Advertising is an appeal to the attention, to the memory, to the feeling, to the impulses of the reader. Every printed line of advertisement is thus a lever which is constructed to put some mental mechanism in motion. The science of the mental machinery is psychology, which works on principles with the exact methods of the experiment. It seems unprogressive, indeed, if just this one industry neglects the help which experimental science may furnish. A few slight beginnings, to be sure, have been made, but not by the men of affairs, whose practical interests are involved. They have been made by psychologists who in these days of carrying psychology into practical life have pushed the laboratory method into the field of advertising.

The beginnings indicated at once that much which is sanctioned by the traditions of economic life will have to be fundamentally revised. Psychologists, for instance, examined the memory value of the different parts of the page. Little booklets were arranged in which words were placed in the four quarter pages. The advertiser is accustomed patiently to pay an equal amount for his quarter page, whether it is on the left half or the right, on the lower or on the upper part of the page. The experiment demonstrated that the words on the upper right-hand quarter had about twice the memory value of those on the lower left. The advertiser who is accustomed to spend for his insertion on the lower left the same sum as for that on the upper right throws half his expenditure away. He reaches only half of the customers, or takes only half a grasp of those whom he reaches. This case, which can be easily demonstrated by careful experiments, is typical of the tremendous waste which goes on in the budget of the advertising community. And yet the advertiser would not like to act like the poet who sings his song not caring whose heart he will stir.

As long as the psychologist is only aware of an inexcusable waste of means by lack of careful research into the psychological reactions of the reader, he may leave the matter to the business circles which have to suffer by their carelessness. But this economic wrong may coincide with cultural values in other fields, and the social significance of the problem may thus become accentuated. A problem of this double import, economic and cultural at the same time, to-day faces publishers, advertisers, and readers. It is of recent origin, but it has grown so rapidly and taken such important dimensions that at present it overshadows all other debatable questions in the realm of propaganda. The movement to which we refer is the innovation of mixing reading matter and advertisements on the same page. In the good old times a monthly magazine like McClure's or the American or the Metropolitan or the Cosmopolitan showed an arrangement which allowed a double interpretation. One interpretation, the idealistic one, was that the magazine consisted of articles and stories in solid unity, which formed the bulk of the issue. In front of this content, and after it, pages with advertisements were attached. The other interpretation, which suggested itself to the less ambitious reader, was that the magazine consisted of a heap of entertaining advertisement pages, between which the reading matter was sandwiched. But in any case there was nowhere mutual interference. The articles stood alone, and the automobiles, crackers, cameras, and other wares stood alone, too. All this has been completely changed in the last two or three years. With a few remarkable exceptions like the Atlantic Monthly, the World's Work, and the Century, the overwhelming majority of the monthly and weekly papers have gone over to a system by which the tail of the stories and articles winds itself through the advertisement pages, and all the advertising sheets are riddled by stray pieces of reading matter. The immediate purpose is of course evident. If the last dramatic part of the story suddenly stops on page 15 and is continued on page 76, between the announcements of breakfast food and a new garter, the publisher, or rather the advertiser, hopes, and the publisher does not dare to contradict, that some of the emotional interest and excitement will flow over from the loving pair to the advertised articles. The innocent reader is skilfully to be guided into the advertiser's paradise.

We claimed that here the economic innovation, whether profitable or not, has its cultural significance. The sociologists who have thought seriously about the American type of civilization have practically agreed in the conviction that the shortcoming of the American mind lies in its lack of desire for harmony and unity. It is an Æsthetic deficiency which counts not only where art and artificial beauty are in question, but shows still more in the practical surroundings and the forms of life. The nation which is and always has been controlled by strong idealistic moral impulses takes small care of the Æsthetic ideals. The large expenditures for external beautification must not deceive. Just as the theatre is to the American essentially entertainment and amusement and fashion, but least of all a life need for great art, so on the whole background of daily life a thousand motives show themselves more effectively than the longing for inner unity and beautiful fitness. The masses who waste their incomes for beautiful clothes, not because they are beautiful, but because they are demanded by the fashion, patiently tolerate the dirt in the streets, the crowding of cars, the chewing of gum, the vulgar slang in speech, and shirt-sleeve manners. But this undeveloped state of the sense of inner harmony has effects far beyond the mere outer appearances. The hysterical excitement in politics, the traditional indifference to corruption and crime up to the point where they become intolerable, the bewildering mixture of highest desire for education and cheapest faith in superstitions and mysticism and quacks, all must result from a social mind in which the Æsthetic demand for harmony and proportion is insufficiently developed. The one great need of the land is a systematic cultivation of this Æsthetic spirit of unity. It cannot be forced on the millions by any sudden and radical procedures. The steady, cumulating influences of the whole atmosphere of civic life must lead to a slow but persistent change. Fortunately, many such helpful agencies are at work. Not only the systematic moulding of the child's mind by art instruction, and of the citizen's mind by beautiful public buildings, but a thousand features of the day aid in bringing charm and melody to the average man.

Seen from this point of view the new fashion in the makeup of the periodical literature is a barbaric and inexcusable interference with the process of Æsthetic education. A page on which advertisements and reading matter are mixed is a mess which irritates and hurts a mind of fine Æsthetic sensitiveness, but which in the uncultivated mind must ruin any budding desire for subtler harmony. The noises of the street, with all the whistles of the factories and the horns of the motor cars, are bad enough, and the antinoise crusade is quite in order. Yet the destructive influence of those chaotic sounds is far weaker than the shrillness and restlessness of these modern specimens of so-called literature. The mind is tossed up and down and is torn hither and thither, following now a column of text while the advertisements are pushing in from both sides, and then reading the latest advertisement while the serious text is drawing the attention. It is the quantity which counts. The popular magazines which circulate in a million copies and reach two or three million minds are the loudest preachers of this sermon of bewilderment and scramble. A consciousness on which these tumultuous pages hammer day by day must lose the subtler sense of proportionate harmony and must develop an instinctive desire for harshness and crudeness and chaos. To overcome this riot of the printing press is thus a truly cultural task, and yet it is evident that the mere appeal to the cultural instinct will not change anything as long as the publisher and, above all, the advertiser, are convinced that they would have to sacrifice their personal profit in the interest of Æsthetic education. If an end is to be hoped for, it can be expected only if it is discovered that the calculation of profit is erroneous, too. But this is after all a question of naked facts, and only the scientific examination can decide.

The problem might be approached from various sides. It was only meant as a first effort when I carried on the following experiment: I had a portfolio with twenty-four large bristol-board cards of the size of the Saturday Evening Post. On eight of those cards I had pasted four different advertisements, each filling a fourth of a page. On some pages every one of the four advertisements took one of four whole columns; in other cases the page was divided into an upper and lower, right and left part. All the advertisements were cut from magazines, and in all the name of the firm and the object to be sold could be easily recognized. On the sixteen other pages the arrangement was different. There only two fourths of the page were filled by two advertisements; the other two fourths contained funny pictures with a few words below. These pictures were cut from comic papers. All the pictures were of such a kind that they slightly attracted the attention by their amusing content or by the cleverness of the drawing, but never demanded any careful inspection or any delay by the reading of the text. This, in most cases, consisted of a few title words like “The Widow's Might,” “Pause, father, is that whip sterilized?” or similar easily grasped descriptions of the story in the picture. Even where the text took two lines, it was more easy to apperceive the picture and its description than the essentials of the often rather chaotic advertisements. By this arrangement we evidently had thirty-two advertisements on the eight pages which contained nothing else, and thirty-two other advertisements on the sixteen pages which contained half propaganda and half pictures with text. All this material was used as a basis for the following test, in which forty-seven adult persons participated. All were members of advanced psychological courses, partly men, partly women. None of those engaged in the experiment knew anything about the purpose beforehand. Thus they had no theories, and I carefully avoided any suggestion which might have drawn the attention in one or another direction.

Every one had to go through those twenty-four pages in twelve minutes, devoting exactly thirty seconds to every page, and a signal marked the time when he had to pass to the next. He was to give his attention to the whole content of the page, and as both the pictures and the advertisements were chosen with reference to their being easily understood and quickly grasped, an average time of more than seven seconds for each of the four offerings on the page was ample, even for the slow reader. Of course the time would not have been sufficient to read every detail in the advertisements, but no one had any interest in doing so, as they were instructed beforehand to keep in mind essentially the advertised article and the firm, and in the case of the pictures a general impression of the idea.

As soon as the twenty-four pages had been seen, every one was asked to write down the ideas of five of the funny pictures within three minutes. The results of this were of no consequence, as the purpose was only to fill the interval of the three minutes in order that all the memory pictures of the advertisements might settle down in the mind and that all might have an equal chance If we had turned immediately to the writing down of firms and articles, the last ones seen would have had an undue advantage. But when the three minutes had been filled with an effort to remember some of the funny pictures and to write down their salient points, all the mental after-images of the pages had faded away, and a true memory picture was to be produced. In the presentation care was taken to have the twenty-four pages follow in irregular order, the pages of straight advertising mixed with those of the double content. After the three minutes every one had to write down as many names of firms with the articles as his memory could reproduce. The time was now unlimited. Nothing else was to be added; the reference to the particular advertisement was entirely confined to the firm and the object. Where they knew the firm name without the object, or the article without the advertiser, they had to make a dash to indicate the omission. The aim was to discover whether the thirty-two advertisements on the mixed pages had equal chances in the mind with the thirty-two on the straight advertisement pages. In order to have an exact basis of comparison, we counted every name 1, and every article 1. Thus when firm and object were correctly given it was counted 2.

Of course there were very great individual differences. It is evident that a person who would have remembered all the sixty-four advertisements on this basis of calculation would have made 128 points. The maximum which was actually made was in the case of two women, each of whom reached 50 points. One man reached 49. The lowest limit was touched in the exceptional case of one woman who made only 11 points. The average was 28.4. These figures seem small, considering that less than a fourth were kept in mind, and even by the best memory less than a half, but it must be considered that in the modern style of advertisement the memory is burdened with many side features of the announcement, and that the result is therefore smaller than if name and article had been memorized in an isolated form. But these figures have no relation to our real problem. We wanted to compare the memory fate of the advertisements on the one kind of pages with that of the parallel advertisements on the other kind. As soon as we separate the two kinds of reproduced material we find as total result that the forty-seven persons summed up 570 points for the advertisements on pages with comic pictures, but 771 for the advertisements on pages which contained nothing else. The average individual thus remembered about six whole advertisements out of the thirty-two on the combined pages, and about eight and a fifth of the thirty-two on the straight pages. Among the forty-seven persons, there were thirty-six who remembered the straight-page notices distinctly better than the mixed-page advertisements, and only eleven of the forty-seven showed a slight advantage in favour of the mixed pages. In the case of the men this difference is distinctly greater than in the case of the women. Only two of the fifteen men who participated showed better reproducing power for the mixed material, while nine of the thirty-two women favoured it. As the advertiser is not interested in the chance variations and exceptional cases among the reading public, but naturally must rely on the averages, the results show clearly that the propaganda made on pages which do not contain anything but advertisements has more than a third greater chances, as the relation was that of 6 to 8.2.

The result is hardly surprising. We recognized that the conditions for the apprehension of the special advertisements are in themselves equally favourable for both groups. As the pictures were very easily grasped, it may even be said that there was more time left for the study of the advertisements on the mixed pages, and yet the experiment showed that they had a distinct disadvantage. The self-observation of the experimenters leaves hardly any doubt that the cause for this lies in the different attitude which the mixed pages demand from the reader. The mental setting with which those pictures or the written matter is observed, is fundamentally different from that which those propaganda notices demand. If the mind is adjusted to the pleasure of reading for its information and enjoyment, it is not prepared for the fullest apprehension of an advertisement as such. The attention for the notice on the same page remains shallow as long as the entirely different kind of text reaches the side parts of the eye. On those pages, on the other hand, which contain announcements only, a uniform setting of the mind prepared the way for their fullest effectiveness. The average reader who glances over the pages of the magazines is not clearly aware of these psychological conditions, and yet that feeling of irritation which results from the mixing of reading matter and propaganda on the same page is a clear symptom of this mental reaction. The mere fact that both the advertisements and stories or anecdotes or pictures are seen in black and white by the retina of the eye, and are in the same way producing the ideas of words and forms in the mind, does not involve the real psychological effect being the same. The identical words read as a matter of information in an instructive text, and read as an argument to the customer in a piece of propaganda, set entirely different mental mechanisms in motion. The picture of a girl seen with the understanding that it is the actress of the latest success, or seen with the understanding that it is an advertisement for a toilet preparation, starts in the whole psychophysical system different kinds of activities, which mutually inhibit each other. If we anticipate the one form of inner reaction, we make ourselves unfit for the opposite.

An interesting light falls on the situation from experiments which have recently been carried on by a Swedish psychologist. He showed that in every learning process the intention with which we absorb the memory material is decisive for the firmness with which it sticks to our mind. If a boy learns one group of names or figures or verses with the intention to keep them in mind forever, and learns another group of the same kind of material with the same effort and by the same method, but with the intention to have them present for a certain test the next day, the mental effect is very different. Immediately after the learning, or on the morning of the next day, he has both groups equally firmly in his mind, but three days later most of what was learned to be kept is still present. On the other hand, those verses and dates which were learned with the consciousness that they had to serve the next day have essentially faded away when the time of the test has passed, even if the test itself was not given. Every lawyer knows from his experience how easily he forgets the details of the case which has once been settled by the court, as he has absorbed the material only for the purpose of having it present up to the end of the procedure. These Swedish experiments have given a cue to further investigations, and everything seems to confirm this view. It brings out in a very significant way that the impressions which are made on our mind from without are in their effectiveness on the mind entirely dependent upon the subjective attitude, and the idea that the same visual stimuli stir up the same mental reactions is entirely misleading. The attitude of reading and the attitude of looking at advertisements are so fundamentally different that the whole mental mechanism is in a different setting.

The result is that whenever we are in the reading attitude, we cannot take the real advertising effect out of the pictures and notices which are to draw us to the consumption of special articles. The editor who forces his wisdom into the propaganda page is hurting the advertiser, who, after all, pays for nothing else but the opportunity to make a certain psychological impression on the reader. He gets a third more of this effect for which he has to pay so highly if he can have his advertisement on a clean sheet which brings the whole mind into that willing attitude to receive suggestions for buying only. It is most probable that the particular form of the experiment here reported makes this difference between advertising pages with and without reading matter much smaller than it is in the actual perusal of magazines, as we forced the attention of the individual on every page for an equal time. In the leisurely method of going through the magazine the interfering effect of the editorial part would be still greater. Compared with this antagonism of mental setting, it means rather little that these scattered pieces of text induce the reader to open the advertisement. If we were really of that austere intellect which consistently sticks to that which is editorially backed, we should ignore the advertisements, even if they were crowded into the same page. They might reach our eye, but they would not touch our mind. Yet there is hardly any fear that the average American reader will indulge in such severity of taste. He is quite willing to yield to the temptation of the advertising gossip with its minimum requirement of intellectual energy for its consumption. He will therefore just as readily turn from the articles to the advertisements if they are separated into two distinct parts. Frequent observations in the Pullman cars suggested to me rather early the belief that these advertisement parts in the front and the rear of the magazine were the preferred regions between the two covers.

Just as the great public habitually prefers the light comedy and operetta to the theatre performances of high Æsthetic intent, it moves instinctively to those printed pages on which a slight appeal to the imagination is made without any claim on serious thought. It is indeed a pleasant tickling of the imagination, this leisurely enjoyment of looking over all those picturesque announcements; it is like passing along the street with its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour. But this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the arrangement after to-day's fashion. Those pages on which advertising and articles are mixed helterskelter do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if we constantly had to alternate between lazy strolling and energetic running. Thus the chances are that the old attractiveness of the traditional advertising part has disappeared. While those broken ends of the articles may lead the reader unwillingly to the advertisement pages, he will no longer feel tempted by his own instincts to seek those regions of restlessness; and if he is of more subtle sensitiveness, the irritation may take the stronger form, and he may throw away the whole magazine, advertisement and text together. The final outcome, then, must be disadvantageous to publisher and advertiser alike. The publisher and the editor have certainly never yielded to this craving of the advertiser for a place on the reading page without a feeling of revolt. Commercialism has forced them to submit and to make their orderly issues places of disorder and chaos. The advertisers have rushed into this scheme without a suspicion that it is a trap. The experiments have proved that they are simply injuring themselves. As soon as this is widely recognized, a countermovement ought to start. We ought again to have the treasures of our magazines divided into a straight editorial and a clean advertisement part. The advertisers will profit from it in dollars and cents through the much greater psychological effectiveness of their announcements, the editors will be the gainers by being able to present a harmonious, sympathetic, restful magazine, and the great public will be blessed by the removal of one of the most malicious nerve irritants and persistent destroyers of mental unity.