To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single stomach in the country.
To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a hundred million people--go in through the kitchen door of every house with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar when they ordered eight.
Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people look out of their windows on streets--thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the Germans!
We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in America, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany--was to interrupt people's personal daily habits.
The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to the people to whom we are trying to express it.
The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalists and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an hour in the day.
The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, in expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is plain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of the working ideas of the Air Line League.
Our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen is not to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wish we would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us to speak to them. Let a hundred million people do something to the people who take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonder what the hundred million people think.
The true way to advertise is to make the people you advertise to, do it. To get an idea over to the Germans do something to them that will make them come over to us--come all the way over to us and extract it. The same principle is going to be applied next by the Public Group in industry. We will do something that will make them--capital and labor--say: "What do you mean?"