Storyboard Read Online Free Page A

whether or not you can reach them economically by advertising—for, let us say, if only women under the age of twenty-five can be expected to buy your product, and only 20 per cent of the readership of a women’s magazine which reaches two million women are under that age, and if the cost of a colour-page in that magazine should be £ 2,800, you will be paying fourteen shillings to show your advertisement in colour at a reasonable size to each hundred of your potential customers, who may not even read the advertisement , let alone buy your product. Only then will the Creative Departments of the Agency, knowing now towhom they have to sell and for what reasons and by what media, only then will they begin to devise advertisements , making them as credible as they can, and as memorable so that long after the telly has been switched off, the magazine laid by, the poster left behind in the crowded street, those advertisements will go on working in the mind. And that is what happened to Foundation Soap. It was a success story of advertising today; many people had worked in different ways to make it sell successfully .
    Foundation Soap combined a cream base with ( although this was not made explicit in the advertising) a light dye which wore off within a few hours. The best foundation for make-up, as actors know, is a clean, but slightly oily skin. Ordinary soap cleans, but takes out the natural oils of the skin; Foundation Soap put the oil back again, and added also the delicate bloom of peach, apple blossom, magnolia, rose or gypsy, so that one had the illusion of wearing make-up even before make-up was applied. Obviously there were many people who would not buy Foundation Soap, or at any rate they would not buy it more than once. It was not a family soap. Many fathers and children will wash themselves with delicately coloured beauty soap containing genuine perfume from France if they happen to find it in the wash-basin; indeed , they may enjoy doing so. But going to school or to the office delicately tinted with gypsy is quite another thing. Soap is family property; once it has been used, it cannot lie on a dressing-table with cosmetics. So Foundation Soap was used mainly by women living alone or with other women. They formed a small market, Donald said; they were difficult to reach by advertising without wastage; but there were enough of them to make Foundation Soap a profitable product.
    “Market wouldn’t stand another though, would it?” said P.A.
    “Another Foundation Soap? I shouldn’t think so.”
    “Hugh, what do you think?”
    Hugh blinked, and sat up on the sofa. “Oh, I agree with Donald,” he said. “I always do.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s always right. I’ve been letting Donald do my Marketing thinking for ten years now.”
    P.A. made the face which passed for a smile when he didn’t feel like smiling. It was a convention within the Agency that Hugh was irreplaceable because he had been around for so long—a sound man, if not brilliant; people like that, it was said, were needed as ballast. So you might strip Hugh of his accounts, but you could never get rid of him, and because this was generally known Hugh had licence, even from P.A.
    “And if our people went into the market?” P.A. said.
    “Hoppness? They’d lose some money; that’s all. I mean, if Hoppness wentin, Miles & Baker and A.M.P.O. would be bound to follow; you know what they are for not leaving well alone. And the market can’t take two Foundation Soaps, as Donald said, never mind four.”
    “So what would happen to Pettifer’s?”
    “They couldn’t keep it up, spending at our rate…. Oh, I see.”
    “That’s right, Hugh,” P.A. said. “You do see. Pettifer’s would have to pull out. No more Foundation Soap.”
    Donald said, “I shouldn’t think it would be worth our while to stay in either. The whole thing would fold.”
    “But Pettifer’s would be out. Our clients don’t like outsiders coming into the soap field.”