Walter Smith of Cabot’s factory, who was badly injured some time
ago by being caught in a chain belt used in lowering lamp-black to the river,
was in town last week, and is improving nicely.
Word was received that Earle Stump, formerly of this place, was
accidentally burned about the face and hands while working on a well in Rock
Creek. It was deemed not serious.
Al Kimble came to town on Thursday with a load of grist for the
mill. He was driving a fine yoke of young oxen.
One marvels at the quality of some of the commercials used on
radio and television. It is as if we are all morons when we sit through some of
the pure hokum, which ad men are paid large sums of money to prepare.
The greatest need in the entertainment world is for quality
script writers, in both the entertainment and advertising fields. Most of
today’s movies, television dramas, etc., are obviously second grade. The excuse
writers get by on is that they are aiming at the “mass market.”
This is an hallucination of the times to a
large degree. Recent books and the trend in marketing stress the “mass market.”
The manufacturers of products are told that a certain pitch will appeal to the
top 10 percent of the country’s buyers, that another level pitch will appeal to
another 20 percent of the buyers, but that a certain lower grade pitch will
appeal to the huge lower class segment of the market, in the amount of 40 or 50
percent. The theory may even hold true for certain products, such as soap, etc.
The American people have always striven to
uplift themselves to understand the better things in life and to obtain them. An
appeal to our higher instincts and intellects will have its results with the
lower income groups.
The use of all these phony words describing
certain products, the wonderful new properties of certain fake devices or
chemicals, and general ballyhoo over nothing, fools fewer Americans than ad
writers believe.