An Association Fights "the Enemy at Home"

During World War I, the newly formed American Social Hygiene Association campaigned to arrest the spread of venereal disease, an incurable "enemy" afflicting over 100,000 Americans soldiers.

The association teamed with the War Department to teach American boys how to avoid the infections, and worked with local civilian and military police to break up the prostitution rings that plied near military bases.

To convince soldiers of the wisdom of remaining disease-free, the association distributed pamphlets, posters, slide shows and films that relied on a mix of medical facts, appeals to patriotism, and moral suasion. 

One pamphlet depicted a patriotic mother fretting over the chance her soldier-son will catch VD. "She does not fear your death—your honorable death," the pamphlet said, "but the dread that you may become innocently contaminated pulls at her heart-strings.”

To break up prostitution rings, association members joined forces with local vice squads and the military police to round up and jail prostitutes and seal off red-light districts.

The Stars and Stripes proudly reported: “Mothers need have no fear that their sons are being dragged down to hell by vicious women.”

A Book for Every Man

When the US joined World War I, the American Library Association launched a fundraising campaign designed to provide troops leisure-time reading.

In only three months, A Book for Every Man raised $5 million, enabling the ALA to ship more than 385 thousand donated books overseas. Before the war's end, that number would reach 10 million. 

Books were delivered to camp libraries and hospitals; placed on transport ships and troop trains; and sent to German prisons housing American POWs. Many were how-to books that helped the soldiers master subjects like accounting, electrical engineering, plumbing, and carpentry; others helped them wage war against Germany; while still others helped them improve their scores in popular games like checkers, chess, poker, and dominoes.

Most of the books were escapist page-turners, meant to fill the idle hours. Among the most popular contemporary authors were writers we still read today, including L. Frank Baum, John Buchan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Willa Cather, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Zane Grey, H.P. Lovecraft and H.G.Wells.

How to Bust Public Enemy Number 1

Banner blindness is lead-gen's Public Enemy Number 1.

Ad blocking may be copping all the headlines; but if your ads don't arrest prospects' attention, they might as well be blocked.

Here are four things you can do to bust banner blindness:

Build better ads―follow tried-and-true ad-design principles and focus prospects' eyes on your call to action. HINT: Photos of smiling faces work wonders.

Help prospects―"contextually target" your ads to amplify the content on the pages where they appear. Help readers who may be searching for specific information or solutions.

Entertain―invest in high-end video. Testimonials are highly effective.

Go native―forget about banners and embed your ads in the editorial stream.

Fond Memories of a Forgotten Industry

If you want to know where the future goes to be seen, look here.

― Charles Pappas

Charles Pappas, reporter for Exhibitor, has compiled a lighthearted treasury of trade show tales titled Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World's Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World. 

It's a whimsical wayback machine that whirls you through a century and a half of gadgets and the shows that made them famous.

Pappas' goal isn't to spotlight the stars, but the stage. 

Although worth about $100 billion today, trade shows are a forgotten industry, he says, "as invisible as the oxygen in the air around us."

And that's ironic because shows are much more than "product platforms," Pappas says: they help launch social movements.

You'll find tons of delightful trivia inside his 250 pages.

Among my favorite:

• We owe our obsession with dinosaurs to an 1851 London show
  
  
• We eat bananas because an 1876 Philadelphia show popularized them
  
  
• The seed money for the Statue of Liberty came from shows in Paris and Philadelphia
  
  
• Aunt Jemima owes her fame to an 1893 Chicago show
  
  
• The electric vibrator premiered at a 1900 Paris show (where else?)
  
  
• The Patriotic Food Show promoted eating roadkill to help ration food in 1918
  
  
• Space travel launched at a 1927 show in Moscow (30 years before Sputnik)
  
  
• Picasso's "Guernica" began life as a trade show mural
  
  
• The run on Nylon stockings began at the 1939 New York show
  
  
• The term "Con" (as in Comic-Con) was coined by the same promoter who coined "Sci-Fi"

Pappas' book suffers from the author's overuse of puns, but they're easily overlooked amid the fascinating stories he tells. 

Don't miss Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords. It's a lot of fun.

Free College for Everyone

Anyone can go in, but it is not everyone who can go out.

― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Bernie Sanders only says free college should be everyone's right; Donald Trump is guaranteeing it is.

Inmates of London's Marshalsea―enshrined in the novels of Charles Dickens―liked to call the brutal debtors' prison "the college."

Trump is busy reinstituting Marshalsea-style "colleges" nationwide.

Although federal debtors' prisons were outlawed in the 1830s, the states remain free to operate them.

Since the 1980s, one-third―including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Texas―have found them immensely profitable ventures, both for state and local governments and for the shareholders of private-prison companies like Geo and CCA.

And where there are profits to be made, you'll find Trump.

So, parents, celebrate!

College lies in every child's future.