Life, 1927-12-22 · page 34 of 36
Life — December 22, 1927 — page 34: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is an opinion piece (not satire) by "Andy Consumer" arguing that national advertising benefits the public. The cartoon shows a cheerful figure testing toothpaste against a "bureau of standards"—illustrating the article's central claim. The argument: advertising creates accountability. Named, branded products can be publicly criticized and boycotted if defective, whereas unnamed merchandise sold "out of barrels and bins" (pre-modern commerce) allowed inferior goods to persist undetected. National advertising, the author contends, subjects products to "the fiercest of all bureaus of standards"—consumer use itself. The subtext reflects early-20th-century debates about consumer protection and advertising's role. Rather than cynically mocking ads, this piece defends them as a form of market transparency and quality control, trusting consumers to recognize and punish poor products through reputation damage.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
@ — of Stamdvds YOUR MONEY’S WORTH DVERTISING may not be perfect, but how would you like to live in a community with- out any? I. myself. wouldn't like to go back to the days when things had no names and we had to buy nondescript nonentity merchan- dise out of barrels and bins In those days you couldn't even knock an inferior product satis- factorily—not knowing its name Today if we have a bad word for a mouth wash or a safety razor we can call it by name and a nation will hear. Big-scale advertising makes possible not only big-scale acceptance but big-scale condem- nation. Big-scale knockers will do well to choose advertised products or they will find a small audience THE NATIONAL ADVERTISER BETS HIS | ADVERTISING MONEY THAT HIS PRODUCT IS RIGHT \n inferior product without a name may thrive insidiously for years. But a valid discovery of a defect or a shortcoming in an ad- vertised trade-marked product can kill it overnight. You and | can turn reputation into notoriety in a jiffy if we know names National advertising makes pos- sible a quick nation-wide public test of anew product in the fiercest of all bureaus of standards—that of practical trial and use by you and me. And if that product does not measure up—zowie! You public (including me) were not born yesterday. You don’t need any text books to teach you how to howl if you don’t get your money's worth a CY, mCP ‘ comicbooks.com