Radio showmanship (Jan-Dec 1944)

display. It will require this kind of specialization, extra skill and research to build the effective show windows in people's homes through television. I see an entire new industry of men and women who will learn to treat with merchandise for these visual presentations so they will be dramatic, interesting and sellable. Remember, it is a dynamic process in a dynamic age. It will not be possible to drape a fabric or a dress in front of a lense and have people become interested in it. Where do stores come in with effective competition for world news, expensive entertainment and sports events, which will be seen as they occur and not be rehashed by an announcer or edited by a news camera? The answer to that is that they don't come in! That will not be the function of television for the department store. Again you see the distinction between purely vocal advertising, radio, and the visual, television. In the vocal, you can hitch a selling message on to a news program. In the visual, the message will be the bread and butter itself, that is, the actual merchandise. In the newspapers and magazines, for example, we advertise the actual goods, not a news program. In television we will be able to do so again. But, with a different technique. Let us get the picture again. Right in our homes we will see events the split second they occur. So what we will be able to offer our customers is the news of merchandise behind the scenes as it comes into the store. The public will have a visual catalog for shopping if it is done dramatically and interestingly enough. (Obviously, you are not going to get away with shooting a camera at your static cases of goods.) But there is excitement and interest for women in store activities, the use of goods and all the new things that are going to explode upon us after the war. The background of these new things has never been interestingly or properly presented to the public. Under television they will come to life. The miraculous scientific back FEBRUARY, 1944 ground of a new fabric like Nylon can be made really dramatic by showing the laboratory method of production and showing scientific tests demonstrating why it wears so well. All these Bureaus of Standards that you see now that are so dry in reading can come to life and can prove before your eyes that materials won't stretch, fade, or wear-out except under certain duress. Merchants who are struggling to find the solution to the present static window display will eventually find their answer in the dynamic television screen which will give movement, vitality, interest, change and immediacy. Your customer of the future, facing what is now the framed still-life window display, will find herself looking into active moving exhibits of merchandise either from within the store or other interesting sources. As I think of it, the present window display compared with the future television window will probably seem to us at a not distant time like a framed picture of dead fish in a Victorian diningroom. One of the prospects that seems especially inviting to me about the advent of television is the bridge that it will create between the merchant and the customer. As the big stores became larger, they became more impersonal, and naturally lost touch somewhat with the individual customer. Television will help bridge this gap. It will create, if not an individual association, a closer feeling between the actual store and customer. All of this, I believe, indicates that merchants will be obliged some day to reorient their thinking in the matter of communication with their customers. Those who learn the most about it with the greatest curiosity, patience, research and intelligence will be there first and foremost. Others may be left behind. So I advise merchants not to think of television as the miracle which, like Minerva sprung full-armed from the head of Jove. Television will develop slowly, step by step, but it is coming as a dominant factor in our relation to our customers. 43