Scientific Advertising

You’ve learned some things about marketing. Maybe you’ve checked out some internet articles, watched some videos and/or read some marketing books.

But how many ‘old’ marketing books have you read?

I’ve read a bunch of books over the years and continue to do so as much as possible. And although I have a few favorites, in my opinion, the most important one is not a new one. In fact, it may very well be the oldest:

Scientific Advertising was written by Claude C. Hopkins in 1923 and is truly a seminal book for the world of split testing and direct response marketing. The principles of testing and measuring that Hopkins established are as important today as back then. The difference being that what took months to test back then through newspapers, magazines, and direct mail, can be tested nowadays with extraordinary speed online.

The uninformed would be staggered to know the amount of work involved in a single ad. Weeks of work sometimes. The ad seems so simple, and it must be simple to appeal to simple people. But back of that ad may lie reams of data, volumes of information, months of research.

So this is no lazy man’s field.

Scientific Advertising, Claude C. Hopkins, 1923

The mantra of 21st-century marketing is the same as back then: Test, Test and More Testing!

Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them—not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort—the buyers of your product. (1923)

Scientific Advertising, Claude C. Hopkins, 1923