What the inventor of the teddy bear has to remind us about advertising

In his regular column, Jeremy Bullmore reminds us of the enduring wisdom of Seymour Eaton, who was writing about advertising more than a hundred years ago.

What the inventor of the teddy bear has to remind us about advertising

Jeremy Bullmore

'The best things in these sermons are as old as the hills,' wrote Seymour Eaton 103 years ago. These are the opening words of the prologue to a very slim volume called Sermons on Advertisingwhich was published by the J Walter Thompson Co in 1908 as an advertisement for itself. Seymour Eaton was a schoolteacher, a prolific writer of business-related textbooks, a serial entrepreneur, the holder of more than 300 copyrights and the inventor of teddy bears. He seems not to have been...

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