The Ghost in the White House / Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

by Gerald Stanley Lee

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XXI

THE SKILLED CONSUMERS OF PUBLICITY

The trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled. They are not organized to get what they want.

We should organize the Consumers of Publicity, make it possible for the people of America as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what they want.

We should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizing Skilled Readers' Labor Saving Unions.

The difficulties of attaining a power of national listening together—through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so great that they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our having an organization the members of which join it as they will join the Air Line League for the express purpose not of advertising—but of being advertised to.

The most fundamental activity of the Air Line League in the present crisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising of the ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who have certain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to a specific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as I would have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have these same men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them.

It would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of an organization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to.

I say again—if I may be forgiven for the still small voice of platitude—a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it—the most effective advertising is advertising that is asked for.