TRUTH AS A CONSTITUENT OF ADVERTISING * By How^ur) HENDERSON' 1/ice-President, •. [,f/alter Thompson Company, New. York, N.Y. AT ¾ov•t meeting of May 19, 1948, William L. Hahaway opened and closed his excellent analysis. of advertising claims with this state- ment by the Supreme Court: "Advertising as a whole may be completely misleading although ev- ery sentence separately considered is literally true." A vivid example of this fact comes from the autobiography of P. T. Barnum whose fantastic "American Museum" flourished here in New York during the early eighteen six- ties. It was replete with human and animal freaks of all kinds, and what nature failed to provide, Barnum made up himself. With such eye- popping wonders, Barnum had a problem to get the old customers out of his museum in order to make room for new customers at 25c a head. So at the last of his exhibits instead of putting up a sign "This Way Out," his sign read "To the Egress." Thinking that this was some new rare bird, the customers piled through the door and found themselves out on the street. *Presented at the December 8, 1948, Meeting of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists in New York City. Now if you believe that ge. tting new customers .fast is the primary aim of ::: business, Barnum:s sign. "To the Egress" may loo1• like' pretty smart advertising. Every word in it is literally true. But what about those old customers who find themselves dumped out into the street? Will they come again and bring their friends? Or will some- thing within them turn sour against Barnum and advertising claims in general? To come right to the point: how important is truthful ad- vertising in building the business for which each one of you shares re- sponsibility? In discussing. truth, generalities won't do. We know that truth is something which "conforms to fact or reality." But what do we mean by fact or reality? Let's consider together this brief outline of one man's search for truth, a man whom I have known intimately for over thirty years. We were roommates for a year as un- dergraduates and another year in the graduate school. He was per- petually hungry for facts about living things--biology. Every new fact which he thought he could re- 231

232 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS late with others he would record briefly on a card together with its source, and he filed these cards in shoe boxes piled on his desk for ready reference. Here is a photograph which I took in the laboratory at Boylston Hall, Harvard University in May, 1920, when this man was preparing for his doctor's degree in biological chemistry. You will understand his apparatus far better than I. It was set up to establish facts on the effect of certain gases on the hemoglobin of the blood. I recall that only a tiny amount of certain gases was enough to distort th_e equilibrium of the blood constituents sufficiently to cause death of a living creature. He emphasized the importance of equilibrium in the laws of nature. One evening, he took me to the home of his professor, and the three of us discussed until far into the night the laws of the universe. These laws seemed to govern every fiber of life. We could hope to understand them only in part. But nothing was of more value than those few shreds of truth which we might learn. Yet no price in money could ever be put upon such truth. As professional men and women, you clearly understand and share this high regard for truth. In- deed, you participate every day in the search for new facts to add to the storehouse of truth. That is why you are so valuable to your respec- tive companies. But how does this regard for truth apply to the ad- vertising of the companies you rep- resent ? If we try to answer by examples from current advertising, we shall, in effect, be taking re-sections of living skin from our associates to study under the microscope. That might cause pain and leave scars. Instead, let's get a longer per- spective and examine specimens of advertising from the cadaver of American business fifty or sixty years ago. You can then conapare these specimens with impressions of current advertising in your own mind and draw your own conclu- sions. I collected these specimens of old advertising from periodicals in second-hand bookstores in Cin- cinnati over a period of about ten years. One prize exhibit I found covered with coal dust near the furnace of a dark basement. This alluring advertisement is from the old Life magazine, Decem- ber 30, 1886. I quote from the text: "A clear and fresh complex!on is insured to every one using Dr. Campbell's drsenic Complexion Wafers. "The only real beautifier of the complexion skin and form. Face