The Vehicles for National Advertising: Magazine and Catalog

In order to achieve effective distribution of their advertising messages, manufacturers needed a medium that would economically reach all sections of their areas. Such a medium was the national magazine, which followed the railroad lines into the American towns where shelves carried branded products brought by the same rails. There was other factor that spurred magazine development. The increasing literacy rate and the expansion of the Rural Free Delivery system were especially significant. The development of R.F.D. has been called “the least heralded and in some ways most important communications revolution. As advertising revenue continued to show the advertisers’ confidence in the medium to economically deliver a selling message, this concept changed. So it was that in 1890 a publishers was quoted.

Magazines were utilized by producers of commodities ranging from the stir-abundant patent medicines to a new contraption known as a bicycle. The bicycle success story in particular proved that advertising could be used effectively with a new product in pioneering stages as well as with products in highly competitive markets.

The Maturing of the Advertising Agency

As James Webb Young has observed’ National advertising, the advertising agency, and the publisher’s commission to the agent appear to have come into existence together. The agency business took a major step away from its free-lance, wholesaling origins with the development of the so-called open contract by the N.W.Ayer Agency in the 1870s.

Yet, even as the Ayer agency specialized in placing advertising on behalf of its clients in religious weeklies. J. Walter Thompson in general the agencies continued to receive their compensation by a discount from the regular rates of the publication.