TWIN CITY NOTES There are a score of ad clubs of larger membership than the St. Paul Town Criers, but it is doubtful if any club has pulled off a more successful banquet than the sixth annual Town Products Dinner given May 1.

That "the booster bug has bitten every man, woman and child in St. Paul," as claimed in the souvenir edition of the St. Paul Dispatch, was evidenced everywhere.

Five hundred of St. Paul's prominent (wives included) were there; the governor, the mayor, and the presidents of two great railway systems made speeches; the state band furnished the music; and St. Paul's manufacturers and wholesalers furnished an eight-course banquet of St.-Paul-made products, and a laundry-bag full of souvenirs ranging from crackers to tea-strainers.

Governor A. E. Eberhart frankly promised the utmost official support to plans for developing and advertising Minnesota.

Mayor Herbert P. Keller suggested better co-operation between official and business St. Paul, and swore allegiance to every boost-St.Paul movement.

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James J. Hill of the Great Northern presented some solutions to Greater St. Paul's transportation problems. He also urged propaganda to turn farmers in country tributary to St. Paul from wheat raising to cattle and hog raising, as more profitable to the farmers and more essential to the Northwest's prosperity and the nation's needs.

President Howard Elliott of the Northern Pacific supported President Hill's recommendations, and discussed other problems of St. Paul's growth.

President Eli S. Warner of Lindeke, Warner & Co., dry goods manufacturers and wholesalers, recommended greater home consumption of St.-Paul-made products, as well as intensive cultivation of the Minnesota state market.

Advertising Manager J. N. Stewart of the Northern Pacific, president of the Town Criers, was toastmaster.

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After the Wednesday luncheon of April 16 the Town Criers visited the new pure food factories of the Sanitary Food Mfg. Co., conducted by the wholesale grocery house of Griggs, Cooper & Co., for the extensive manufacture of crackers and candy. Advertising Manager Fred T. Hall was host.

The Minneapolis Forum has been very active in improving local advertising conditions, following the passage of the state law against fraudulent advertising. In every case to date, warnings of prosecution have been sufficient to stop attempted abuses. In a number of cases advertisers have voluntarily improved their copy, while in others they have allowed the Forum to blue pencil all objectionable features. The ad men have received hearty support from the newspapers of both cities.

Secretary Emery Mapes of the Cream of Wheat Co. has returned from an extended trip to the Pacific Coast.

Chairman W. M. Horner, of the Promotion Committee of the National Association of Life Underwriters is planning an extensive campaign of education on the matter of life insurance. The appropriation provided by a pro-rata assessment of the leading insurance companies of the country will probably be used in newspapers and national mediums.

The Town Criers and the Advertising Forum, with representatives from neighboring ad clubs, will leave for the Baltimore convention June 7 in a special car. Side trips to Washington, Atlantic City and New York after the convention are planned.

Minneapolis will have two speakers on the regular program at the Baltimore convention.

Editor Allen Albert, of the Minneapolis Tribune will deliver one of the lay sermons to be given by advertising men at the Baltimore churches Sunday, June 8.

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P. V. Collins, publisher of the Northwestern Agriculturist. will give an address on "The Needs and Problems of Agricultural Publications."

It is reported that William Randolph Hearst is soon to commence the erection of two business buildings, which, with the cost of the land, will represent $6,000,000. A ten-story structure located at 315 to 335 West 58th Street, New York, will be occupied by the New York American, And a five-story building located at Columbus Circle, Broadway, Central Park West and 61st Street, will be occupied by the business offices of the New York American.

ST. LOUIS NOTES

Lieutenant-Governor S. R. McKelvie, publisher of the Nebraska Farmer, addressed the St. Louis Advertising Men's League at its weekly meeting April 30 on "Merchandising in Small Towns." He discussed the real conditions of business in rural communities and the most effective ways for national advertisers to develop the agricultural market.

John Lee Mahin, of Chicago, addressed the League April 23.

May 7 Rev. J. E. Meeker, of St. Louis, gave a talk on "Advertising as I See It."

James Schermerhorn, publisher of the Detroit Times, addressed a special meeting of the Ad Men's League at the City Club May 16 on "Testing the Beatitudes-A Twentieth Century Experiment."

Members of the Ad Men's League will have a special train of six cars for the Baltimore convention, leaving St. Louis over the Baltimore & Ohio June 6.

At the convention W. C. D'Arcy, of St. Louis, will have charge of the department meeting June 10, to discuss the problems of advertising agents. Mr. D'Arcy was recently elected a director of the Association of General Advertising Agents of the Middle West.

Coincident with the efforts of the Ad Men's League to raise a large annual fund for advertising St. Louis, comes the announcement that the State Federation of Missouri's Commercial Clubs is planning to raise $100,000 to use immediately in telling the facts and possibilities of Missouri.

The opportunity is well summarized in a recent editorial in the St. Louis Republic:

"Such an advertising campaign as is being planned will not only impress outsiders but it will enlighten Missourians themselves about Missouri. The greatest trouble with us is that we do not know our own state. Missouri men, Missouri energy and Missouri money have gone out from Missouri into other states while greater opportunities for effort and investment here in Missouri have languished unnoticed. And this, because these opportunities were unknown.

"Publicity will correct this. Effective publicity depends on knowledge. Missouri facts must be the framework of Missouri advertising. Most of us in a general way know something

about the state's resources and records. We know that last year we jumped from fifth to fourth place in the value of agricultural products. We know that we are the greatest zine and lead producing state. We know about the superior product of our quarries. The Missouri hen is a royal bird and the Missouri mule a prodigy. We know that Missouri wears a strawberry blush in May and that the apple glints red in Missouri's opulent September. But the idle lands, the unharnessed water power, the fecund acres to be reclaimed, the mineral wealth untapped-well, the chapters of unwritten Missouri have a dazzling glow."

The Curtis Publishing Co., of Philadelphia, has filed a certificate at the state capital at Harrisburg increasing its capital stock from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000.

Fred B. Appleget, until recently editor of the Publishers' Guide, New York, is now editor of Newspaperdom.

William Kopp, who for four years was purchasing agent and manager of the printing department of the castern division of Rand, McNally & Co., and before that twelve years with the Iron Age, has associated himself with the advertising and printing departments of the Bernheim Distilling Company, of Louisville, Kentucky.

Thomas M. Jones is now advertising manager of the Philadelphia Press. He has for eight years been associated with the advertising department of this publication.

President Wilson has nominated E. L. Luckow, editor of the Baraboo Democrat, as auditor of the Navy Department. Mr. Luckow has always claimed to be the original Wilson man in Wisconsin.

Harold Pitts, formerly with the Minneapolis Times and St. Paul Pioneer-Press, and for the past two years on the Spokane Daily-Chronicle staff, has been appointed assistant secretary to the Spokane Chamber of Commerce.

George Ade is being boomed for Congress by his friends down around his country home in Indiana. An attempt is being made to unite the Progressives and the Republicans in his support.

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ITH only a comparatively few exceptions, the newspaper press of the United States always has banked upon the reliability of its news matter and held its editorial utterances as without taint of undue influences of any kind.

In following this policy, naturally, the news paper has looked to the value of its news and editorial ethics as lending additional weight to its advertising space. Strangely enough, however, it is within the last dozen years only, that the publication of unexceptional character in its news columns, has begun to consider that any wildcat advertiser who had the price should not command even preferred space in the advertising columns of the publication. Here and there in specialized journalism in recent years, publishers have broken away from that old policy of victimizing in their advertising columns those readers who had learned to bank heaviest upon the truthfulness of their editorial columns. These pioneers in a new ethics found the venture good. Others followed them and prospered.

Today there is scarcely a session of publishers, held anywhere as an organization, in which advertising ethics is not an important topic. Even the advertising men's associations take up the ideals of "honest advertising" and talk for them. As solicitors of advertising, for the most part working upon a commission basis, they have realized that even the higher rates that may be commanded from the faker is no longer an inducement for them to use his "copy" as a smut upon those advertising columns upon which their steady income depends.

There is no doubt at the present time that everything in the field of journalism is coming more and more under the influence of this new philosophy which was so many years developing into a commonsense policy. There is no mistaking that this innovation will continue, for the reason that the reputable business house never before has been so completely and irrefutably pledged to "making good" upon its stock in trade. Competition, rather than the highest conceptions of man's duty to man, may have forced this condition of trade, but that condition is come and it has come to stay.

It is realized beyond shadow of doubt that the business which shall grow to its full stature under present conditions must advertise judiciously-and NO advertising can be judicious unless based upon the willingness and the ability to make good.

Here, at once, we have the publisher, jealous of the virtue of his advertising columns, keeping tab upon the business house and its treatment of its customers who naturally are the publisher's readers. And in view of this condition, further we have the square business man as a volunteer "assistant editor" of those advertising columns in which a renegade, would-be competitor might seek undue advantage.

Today, perhaps, no field of journalism is accepting the doctrine of honest advertising more earnestly than the agricultural press in all its general and specialized efforts. It is commonplace, nowadays, to find at the head of the editorial pages of agricultural papers the explicit invitation to any reader to report in confidence any advertiser who in any manner has bunkoed a reader.

Considering the enormous number of readers of the agricultural papers of the country and what the aggregate returns are from the pocketbooks of these millions of farmers, there is no class of advertiser who has greater need to regard and safeguard his advertising matter than has this user of the agricultural press.

Why? There are reasons beyond the compass of a single article such as this.

We may take the Farmer, himself, as representative of a class. Comparing the farmer as an individual with other men of his caliber in other walks in urban life, the comparative isolation of the farmer lends to his thoughtfulness and reflection. He is of sober bent, everywhere observant of cause and effect. Once upon a time he could be accused of narrowness of following implicitly the ways that "daddy" followed and more or less intolerant of innovations of any kind.

Long ago, however, the agricultural college and the agricultural experiment stations of both state and nation brought him up standing and at rigid attention as to better ways and better means to more successful ends.

Today tens of thousands of farmers of the new school leave their farms in the busiest of seasons, merely that they may attend the showings of an agricultural station farm, or meet with agricultural experts for a series of lectures. The time necessary and the expense of such trips no longer are regarded as having place on the wrong side of the farmer's ledger. It is an investment to which he looks for returns.

It is in this same spirit of attention that the farmer regards such a vast proportion of advertising matter served up for his consideration in the columns of the agricultural press.

Here the farmer reader finds publicity for the new machine, the new appliance, the new tool that is to accomplish more results with less expenditure of effort. New fruits and seeds and new varieties of farm stock of all kinds are described and pictured to him. New combinations in chemicals are to produce greater crop returns. New treatment for new diseases in stock and plant life are promised him as infallible. In recent years an enormous aggregate of research work has been carried on, all with a purpose to increase farm productions along more economical lines. Nothing in the "profession" of farming has stood still, with the result that the progressive farmer today is wide open to conviction as to better ways and means.

As a suggestion of this open-mindedness, a comparison may be tolerated, odious as comparisons have been declared to be. That average worker in the trades, for example, has little or no interest in the thing which promises to him, as a worker, an increased efficiency. He is a wage-worker according to the time system and to increase his efficiency is to cut his opportunities for making a living.

How different is the attitude of even the hired worker on the farm? He welcomes the labor-saving device. His interest is one with that of his employer in an increased production, as this increase in quantity or quality makes for his own betterment from almost any point of view.

That average advertiser attempting to reach and to hold the farmer as a customer, however, finds the farmer consumer of today rather exacting, perhaps. All farmers are "Missourians" in the sense of demanding that they be shown. Which is natural enough, as considering those things which most interest the farmer as a farmer, an unprofitable investment brought about by misrepresentation of a thing pertaining to his occupation-some

thing which for any reason falls short of his expectations-is likely to cost the farmer more heavily than a like amount of money invested in most pursuits.

A season's seeds which prove infertile at a first planting or sowing, may be so long in showing infertility that the possibility of a second seeding is past. Making restitution of his money and of freight charges in such a case cannot approach a full compensation for the farmer's losses.

In the same way a piece of machinery for planting or harvesting and which fails of economy, or which breaks down and out in the midst of a busy season, may work inestimable damages as compared merely to the cost price. In the old days of the renegade nurseryman, farmers paid the maximum price for nursery stock-prices that competition nowadays scarcely allows for the best, proved stock-and after waiting five years or more for a fruit to bear true to name, discovered that the trees nursed so long and tended, absolutely were worthless!

But if for many and sufficient causes the average farmer is a critical customer, likewise he becomes one of the most enthusiastic of pleased customers when the manufacturer has made good. Here again the community isolation of the farmer serves to make every individual pleased customer a talking, exhibiting agent for that cne thing which in the farmer's life has filled a long-felt want.

Farmer Brown is the first man in his neighborhood to make a purchase and test of a certain something adapted to his business. Likely enough the weekly newspaper in his postoffice town comments upon Farmer Brown's venture, referring to him as "one of our most wide-awake agriculturists." At any rate, news of the venture spreads. Every neighbor he has is interested in the venture. If Farmer Brown has been "gulled”—“sold”-in his progressiveness, neighbors will enjoy the laugh at his expense; if on the other hand he has something worth the money, even more selfishly they will want to know results.

That average Farmer Brown seldom lacks at least the normal bump of self-esteem. If he has made a hit with a novelty he is as willing to talk that fact and make demonstration of it as ever a neighbor could desire-and certainly far more so than most manufacturers appreciate!

All of which brings us back to the advertising manufacturer and dealer and his farmer constituency, which is reached in such huge

numbers by the agricultural journals of the country. Does the manufacturer-dealer, using the advertising columns of the rural press, realize what significance attaches to the certainty of his making good? How much of precaution is he taking that his goods shall make good? In what manner is he to frame his guaranty that at once will keep the good will of both consumer and his advertising media?

Few men, as a class, are quicker to strike to the heart of a proposition pertaining to their work than is the farmer. When it is remembered that the farmer always is either fighting or appeasing even Nature herself-never accepting even an armed neutrality or flag of truce the advertiser who is reaching for the farmer's trade will have to realize the showme conditions under which the farmer ventures.

Everywhere today the business man is accepting the fact that his guaranty accompanies his goods. He must make good or pass along and out of competitive trade. Conceding that a certain article designed for the farmer trade is all that reasonably could be expected of it by the farmer purchaser, there is no other one phase involved in salesmanship so important as that the house shall evolve a working, practical guaranty of its products. And in view of the fact that investments of the kind which prove inutile or inefficient may work undue hardships upon the farmer purchaser, the difficulties of framing this guaranty becomes apparent.

It must not be forgotten that millions of farmers within a comparatively few years have become accustomed to the absolute guarantees as framed by mail order houses of enormous capital. Some of these houses impose almost no conditions under which purchased goods may be returned and money and charges promptly refunded. Merely that the farmer purchaser is dissatisfied with his purchase is sufficient for the big house to invite its return and a prompt refunding of all money paid out.

But in making a study of some of the methods of houses dealing with the farmer trade through advertising in the rural papers, the fact stands out strongly that in these houses' guarantees there are often so much red tapeso many petty impositions of reasons to be given and proofs to be backed up-that the most accomplished by these guarantees is to make the dissatisfied purchaser a vindictive "knocker" of the house, in season and out of season at all times and places.

Perhaps no one great business under the sun, dealing with a general public made up of human beings, ever has succeeded in pleasing EVERYBODY! It is too much for human nature to expect or even to concede as a possibility.

At the same time it is far too much for one to take for granted than any business of any kind ever can approach its full stature without a most carefully-planned general procedure in dealing amicably with such of its customers as of a certainty WILL BE DISSATISFIED! Has YOUR house thoroughly canvassed these methods?

Has it safeguarded everything in connection with the quality of its output and the necessary instructions that may be required for obtaining all that is claimed for the goods? With these two points covered, the likelihood of a dissatisfied customer is reduced to a minimum.

Also with these points reconciled, the form of the guaranty of the advertising concern may be reduced to its simplest terms. Any other form of guaranty, shouldered with petty details of proof and red tape, is certain to react even upon the purchaser who is best satisfied with such a guaranteed purchase.

"I'd have had a devil of a chance, settling. if I HADN'T liked the thing-wouldn't I?"

This is inevitably a human comment upon such a guaranty. Can any advertising backer of a guaranteed article say that he relishes such a comment from a best satisfied customer? Could he expect of one of his best satisfied purchasers that this man would go out of his way to talk his purchase to a good friend who, after all, MIGHT not like it?

The fact is that a guaranty which does not guarantee to the fullest is calculated to work dissatisfaction in a customer who, otherwise, might be satisfied! He feels the sting of the guarantees' impositions. Today there is little temptation, aside from the luxuries of life. for a sane man to make a purchase for the sake of LOOKING at a thing. Especially does the farmer purchaser know his needs, provided the thing for which he spends his money will meet his wants in that respect. He hardly will be accused of parting with his money for an order, calling at the distant freight station in order to cart it home, where he will unpack it, inspect it and-if dissatisfied-take kindly to the idea of having to repack it and make the return shipment while waiting for the return of his money! For the fulfillment of any kind of a mere guarantee!