I would) more desperately.
They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read
where now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertising
he has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or no
the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about
them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true.

It is a platitude.

A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a
great truth.

What the Air Line League is for, one of the things it is for, is to act
on this truth.

Through the three branches, the Look-Up Club, the Try-Out Club and the
Put-Through Clan, the Air Line League is an organization not for
asserting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally sucking
advertising. With its thirty million people joining it, asking to be
advertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the National Vacuum
Cleaner for Truth.

XXI

THE SKILLED CONSUMERS OF PUBLICITY

The trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled.
They are not organized to get what they want.

We should organize the Consumers of Publicity, make it possible for the
people of America as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what they
want.

We should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizing
Skilled Readers' Labor Saving Unions.

The difficulties of attaining a power of national listening
together--through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so great
that they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our having
an organization the members of which join it as they will join the Air
Line League for the express purpose not of advertising--but of being
advertised to.

The most fundamental activity of the Air Line League in the present
crisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising of
the ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who have
certain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to a
specific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as I
would have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have these
same men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them.

It would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of an
organization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to.

I say again--if I may be forgiven for the still small voice of
platitude--a platitude because nobody a