Like the practice of medicine, advertising agency service is personal. An advertising agent must have learned his business by years of experience in advertising, else he gets his knowledge at the expense of his clients. He must be able to reason correctly from particular icases to a principle, and from the principle to another case. He must know his limitations, as expressed in terms of his own experience and that of his organization, and forbear to seek business which he cannot handle to the advertiser's best interest.
Although personal thought, effort and contact play an enormously important part in really efficient advertising agency service, it is, nevertheless, true that organization is almost equally important. The advertising agent who attempts to combine in his own person all of the ramifications of modern agency service is as inefficient and as undesirable from the manufacturer's viewpoint as the agent who, because of his own lack of experience, attempts merely to operate an advertising agency on a cut-and-dried plan by hiring others to do all the work.
At the head of every advertising agency that gives modern service in this country will be found a man of ripe business experience, supplemented by thorough general knowledge of the best advertising agency practice and organization. Such a man has the knowledge to select and the power to attract men whose individual experience will reinforce his own.
