The Value of Advertisement
Money spent on advertising is worth spending. It serves directly to bring about a rapid sale of goods at reasonable prices, so setting up a firm home market and making it possible to provide for export at good price. By drawing attention to new ideas it helps greatly to raise standards of living. By helping to increase demand it causes an increased need for labor, and is therefore a nice way to fight unemployment. It lowers the costs of many services: without advertisements your daily newspaper would cost four times as much, the price of your television program would need to be doubled, and travel by bus or subway would cost more.
And perhaps most important of all, advertising provides a promise of reasonable value in the products and services you buy. Besides the fact that twenty-seven Acts of Parliament govern the terms of advertising, no regular advertiser dare produce anything that fails to live up to the promise of his advertisements. He might fool some people for a little while through misleading advertising. He will not do so for long, for the public has the good sense not to buy the poor goods more than once. If you see a product frequently advertised, it is the proof I know that the product does what is promised for it, and that it has good value.
Advertising does more for the good of the public than any other force I can think of.
There is one more point I feel I ought to touch on. Recently I heard a well-known television person declare that he was against advertising because it persuades rather than informs. He was telling us the real difference. Of course advertising tries to persuade.
If its messages were nothing but information, that would be difficult to get more people to buy, for even the choice of the color of a shirt is a bit persuasive--advertising would be so boring that no one would pay any attention. But perhaps that is what the well-known television person wants.
What is the meaning of "touch on" in Paragraph 4
A. Feel slightly.
B. Strike gently.
C. Write quickly.
D. Mention briefly.
