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of the public. Most of what the public suspects about insurance is wrong, including the suspicion that the agent is a nuisance. We picture insurance as a vast office building, filled with vice presidents and adding machines, and the agent as a persistent haunter of our steps, curious about the date of our birth, who finally gets us in a corner and wins our reluctant consent to be made a sharer in the most splendid coöperative institution modern civilization has devised.

One needs no figures to realize how great the unnecessary expense must be. He need only recall the time spent by one agent in trying to reach and sell him. And if a prospect sells himself he still must pay the agent. He cannot go to the company and buy insurance over the counter. And that is right, as things are. If the system must be, it should be supported. But how much easier the work of the agent if his customers wanted insurance; if he could sit in his office, like a nose-andthroat specialist, while people crowded his reception room to be shown in one by one! Why do people stand in line to buy postage stamps or railroad tickets, and let the insurance agent stand in line to sell them insurance they need far more urgently than they ever needed to mail a letter or make a journey? The answer is habit. The insurance companies have elected to do business that way; the public has acquiesced. Some services are sold. Others are bought. It is the habit for insurance agents to chase customers, and it is the habit for travelers to chase ticket agents. But habits are the result of education, and the most powerful educator to-day is publicity. Advertising could reverse this situation, and give the insurance companies the strategical position of active demand.

The difference in thinking is sharply shown by comparing one group of

business men with another. No motorcar company could think of selling without including advertising. Advertising is as necessary and as inevitable as a factory. Insurance companies, with very few exceptions, have no conception of advertising. They belong in a different era. They continue to function as they started, with no awareness of the new world around them. No important industry is so archaic, so remote from modern life. Banks and trust companies are beginning to realize that they are human institutions as well as financial institutions, but insurance companies have never outgrown the actuarial conception of insurance. The present small volume of insurance advertising is powerless to affect this situation, not because it is not good advertising, but because the volume is small. The great force in advertising is group advertising, not coöperative, except as all advertising for any one industry is coöperative. It is the whole body of automobile advertising that keeps the motor-car idea alive. No one or two manufacturers could do it. Buick advertising sells Dodges as well as Buicks. The continued interest of the public in cars is more necessary to makers of cars than the demand for any one make of car. This is true of all products. The country is too large to be moved greatly by any one advertiser.

This conception of advertising applies especially to insurance. Insurance is an intangible, an idea, a service. Laws hedge it in and standardize it so that there is comparatively little room for choice. What advertising it does must, from the nature of the case, be institutional; that is, for the good of the whole body. Metropolitan Life devotes its space to teaching the value of health. Hartford Fire promotes fire prevention. Each of these campaigns helps all life and all fire

insurance. But these two and a few others are too small to create the mighty chorus necessary to inflame the public mind and give to the word 'insurance' the power to penetrate the consciousness and arouse, quicken, and stir the interest that the words 'motor car' have. If insurance maintained such a body of advertising, to which each company contributed its just quota, insurance would be one of the best-known, most interesting, and most talked-about topics of our daily lives. A hundred campaigns as good as Metropolitan Life or Hartford Fire would do that very thing. With such a body of publicity, insurance would crop up in the news like baseball, radio, or aviation. Nearly every frontpage news story has its insurance slant-the Sherry-Netherland fire, the Snyder murder, the transatlantic flight. The insurance slant is not stressed in the news because the topic is of small interest to the public. The insurance companies confirm this state of mind by their destructive silence.

Things are not talked about because they are intrinsically interesting - they are interesting because they are talked about; because they are brought to our minds daily and hourly, and we are compelled to take account of them. Insurance could be one of those things if its message were delivered, not in small installments, by word of mouth, but by a volume of advertising comparable to the total volume of automobile advertising, but infinitely more interesting.

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on the insurance companies. They are custodians of what has become a great public utility. Even if there were not the obvious selfish reasons for availing themselves of so great an aid to selling as constructive advertising has proved to be, they owe a duty to the public. Even if advertising did not increase the volume of insurance, or, which comes to the same thing, decrease the cost of selling, the insurance companies have no right to withhold from us the real story of insurance.

Many of the great life companies have mutualized themselves, making their policyholders members, whatever that may mean. It does not apparently mean that their policyholders learn any more about their companies, or any company, or life insurance in general, than they did before. But it should mean, should it not, that insurance is no longer the private concern of a small group of officers, but has become a public benefit of such vast possibilities that the public is entitled to such consideration at least as it gets from the selfish sellers of other products that it buys? There is something anomalous about an institution so necessary, so intimately associated with our daily life, which depends so much upon a public state of mind for its growth and prosperity, not availing itself regularly and systematically of such an efficient and inexpensive means of creating public opinion. It is just as possible to advertise ideas as it is to advertise goods. No institution or service has such a wonderful array of material as an insurance company. Its regular course of business is full of incidents of the greatest human interest, things that concern all of us closely and intimately. And all that good stuff goes to waste.

It is seriously asserted that there is no money for advertising; that only so much can be legally spent to secure

business, and this is all given to the agents, who would be unwilling to surrender it or any part of it. Even if the objection were true, it would be negligible. Insurance companies are not maintained for the benefit of their selling staffs. If there is a better way of selling, the field men must adapt themselves to the new conditions. But the primary benefit of advertising is to make the work of agents easier, to enable the same men to write more insurance, or fewer men to write the same volume, because a changed attitude toward insurance will send the public to buy just as it goes to buy other things it has been taught to want

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things, be it said, not so useful or necessary or desirable.

It is further argued that the money belongs to the policyholders, who will not look kindly on such a use of it. This argument was true once, in the days when insurance originated, before the public had accepted advertising as a part of its daily life. The public has changed its attitude, but the insurance magnates have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It is the policyholders' money that is paid to the agent most emphatically the policyholders' money. A goodly percentage of our first payment goes to him, and some fraction of subsequent payments, which, as has been said, is only right and fair as long as the present cumbersome method of selling is maintained. The purchaser pays the cost of selling on everything he buys, and rejoices that modern methods reduce that cost; and he has accepted advertising on this basis, that it makes so many things so accessible geographically and financially that earlier generations never knew. But insurance is not one of those things. It is an anachronism in this day, which is a great pity, for it has all the elements of a spectacular success.

Insurance is the greatest single unadvertised possibility in our modern scheme of living. It is bound to realize that possibility in the end. It is still largely in the hands of the pioneers, the men who made it possible and made it great, but these men are insurance men first, last, and always. They cling to the system they have developed, unaware of the great change that has come about in the world around them. They have not learned, for instance, the value of publicity for its own sake, apart from its material benefits.

The whole world has at the moment been thrilled in contemplating the feat of a gallant young American who flew alone in one continuous flight from New York to Paris. It was one of those happenings which make us proud of the human race. Each of us went about our task with a little more enthusiasm. The world where such things could happen was a pretty good place after all. Suppose it had been possible for Lindbergh to take off without publicity. Suppose for some unimaginable reason the newspapers did not consider the event news. Remember, the Wright brothers' first flight was not considered news. And so there would have been gathered together down there on Curtiss Field a little group of well-wishers, backers, and airmen. All that night, instead of hanging breathlessly on scraps of news while Lindbergh winged his way through night and silence, the civilized world would have gone about its appointed business, not knowing that a great event was in the making. When Lindbergh reached Le Bourget what happened would have been something like what Lindbergh, with his innate modesty, imagined would happen. He would have landed in an empty field, watched by airmen and others who happened to be on the spot; he would have told them what he had done, and they would have been slow

to believe him. He would have parked his plane, hunted up a mechanic, got a cab, and set off to Paris to present his letters of introduction and convince another thrilled group that he had that he had really flown across the Atlantic.

What a loss that would have been to the known world! The feat would be just as fine, just as brave and skillful and wholly admirable, but no one would know it. We should lose all the thrill, the inspiration, the enhanced faith in humanity that the knowledge of it gave us the take-off, the long night of anxious waiting, the safe arrival, the spontaneous reception; two whole hemispheres warmed and stirred and drawn together, not by what young Lindbergh did, but by the high privilege of knowing what he did, and sharing it. Most of the benefit of that flight would have been lost without publicity. It is not unknown good, but known good, that benefits the world. And so with insurance. The life companies have written $11,000,000,000 new insurance in the last twelve months, and not one of us a whit wiser or better or more uplifted because of that fact. It all happened off stage. Yet the stories behind that vast gain would move and stir us, did we but know them, as did Lindbergh's flight or the Mississippi flood.

What holds the insurance companies from advertising is partly indifference and partly ignorance. They feel no need of effort. They are prosperous and content. Also they have no conception of what advertising could and should do for them. They think of it only as a means of immediate selling, which they say they do not need. They refuse to consider its larger and more remote influence, the creation of a public concern about insurance. The public mind is full of a number of things in which it takes great interest. Those things are put into its mind by

suggestion, either by premeditated advertising, as the motor car or radio, or by spontaneous publicity, as baseball or the Atlantic nonstop flights. In any case the public talks about what it hears or reads about. The inherent intrinsic interest of the subject is unimportant. A body of advertising called into existence by all the insurance companies, life, fire, marine, throughout the list, the component parts varying in size according to the resources and needs of the individual companies, composed of the moving and stimulating stories that insurance agents now tell their prospects across glass-topped desks, would, when added together, prove a powerful awakener of public attention and equal in human interest many of the stories the newspapers feature with seventy-point type on their front pages. Whatever argument in favor of an individual company its advertising put forward would be immaterial. The Metropolitan Life, by its admirable presentation of the value of health and the importance of preserving it, is not primarily promoting Metropolitan Life - it is promoting insurance. What it gets is good will, but it benefits all other life companies. If all other life companies joined hands, each selecting its individual note, the message would get over. And so with fire, accident, indemnity, marine, and so forth. What is demanded by the logic of modern business is enough advertising to make insurance the vital topic it deserves to be.

III

It may be that the insurance magnates have no more inspiring conception of insurance than the public has. Perhaps they too consider it the prosaic, statistical, unhuman business that it appears to us to be. Long association with balance sheets, mortality tables,

and actuarial figures is apt to give this point of view. If so, it would be worth their while to sit at the feet of some of their better agents and learn what a moving tale of fire and flood insurance has to tell. Not even the stories Scheherazade related to her spouse have more sustained interest than the rôles insurance plays in human destiny.

If insurance were being presented constantly to all who can read, in terms of living, in terms of man's daily interests and dreams and ambitions and affections, as one of the basic things of life, like getting on in the world, or marriage, or health, or recreation, and especially if all the picturesque and entertaining stories which grow up around the practice of insurance were used, the sight of the word 'insurance' in print would be the signal for such interesting and agreeable mental pictures as accompany the words 'raise in salary,' 'home run,' or 'tax reduction.'

Of things that are basic in us, resting on natural and primitive instincts, self-preservation and self-perpetuation have always been considered two great ones. Self-preservation includes everything from a pay envelope to dodging an automobile. Self-perpetuation includes not only the great function of bearing and raising children, but also every yearning for posthumous fame. The man who gives one hundred thousand dollars to found a public library is moved by practically the same motive as the man who brings up a fine family, though probably it is easier for many men to earn a hundred thousand dollars than to raise a fine family.

I have been reading an interesting book called This Believing World. It is a history of religion. It shows that fear is the origin of all religion. Primitive man found himself at the mercy of forces which he did not understand.

Rain, hail, lightning, flood, and fire snatched away his humble store of food, his flimsy hut, or his family. There seemed to be no reason for these happenings. He believed that they were caused by malignant spirits which were hostile to him. He tried to find some way to propitiate them. By charms, fetishes, totems, sacrifices, and rituals he endeavored to appease the enemies he believed lived in the forces of nature, and out of this fear of the unknown grew the first primitive religion. As man became more civilized and intelligent, and learned more about the world around him, his religion kept pace. He did not lose fear, but he became wiser about it; and when he was intelligent enough to know that religion had nothing to do with the forces of nature at work in the world, he invented insurance, the modern and scientific method of mitigating the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Indeed, much of the world's folklore, Greek and older myths and legends, and many a fairy tale are based on an instinctive but blundering groping for insurance. Achilles' mother bathed him in the Styx to make him immune. How many legends rest on the idea of propitiation of some impending evil, or providing some armor or charm or rite to ward off the dangers surrounding the adventure of life! And what is insurance, all insurance, but preparation to mitigate the accidents of fate, to soften the blow, to render one's self, family, income, possessions, as safe as possible from what may happen?

Another human instinct out of which insurance grows is coöperation. Cooperation is the finest flower of civilization. When hundreds of thousands of people are washed out of their homes by the overflowing Mississippi the nation passes the hat and responds with millions to care for the refugees. This is spontaneous coöperation. But if every

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