“Scientific Advertising In The 21st Century” – Part 1

“Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book (Scientific Advertising) seven times.  It changed the course of my life.”
 – David Ogilvy

One of the foundation books in the canon of Direct Response Marketing and Copywriting literature is “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins (usually found twinned with his autobiography “My Life In Advertising”).  Hopkins was one of the pioneers of modern advertising and copywriting in the years spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But is the book still relevant in the 21st century and the age of the internet?  Not having read the book for a while, I decided to revisit “Scientific Advertising” to see for myself.  This post is the first in a series taking a look at each chapter of the book.

The first chapter is titled “How Advertising Laws Are Established” and Hopkins sets out his philosophy and the basis for the book. He opens the chapter as follows…

“The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science.  It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact.  The causes and effects have been analysed until they are well understood.  The correct methods of procedure have been proven and established.  We know what is most effective, and we act on basic laws.”

“Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest of business ventures.  Certainly no other enterprise with comparable possibilities need involve so little risk.”

This sets the tone for the first chapter and, indeed, the rest of the book.

Here are the main points that I drew from the chapter…

1. Conditions For Success

Hopkins spelt out two conditions for successful advertising as he proposed.  Firstly, there needed to be proper records kept of the results of campaigns so that a database could be established and analysed to determine what worked and what didn’t.  Sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many marketers overlook this detail or don’t keep data in an easy to use format.

Secondly, the data set needed to be large and cover a wide range of different situations.  Readers with an understanding of statistics will understand immediately the reason for this.  To be able to draw valid conclusions for the future, the data needs to have come from a similar situation in the past.  It’s no good trying to predict what will happen in the automobile market based on data from, say, the nutritional supplement market.

2. Relevant, Measurable Results

Hopkins was very insistent that the results of a campaign should be measured in terms of the bottom line.  So he focused on measures such as “cost per customer” or “cost per dollar of sale”.  Note how this is a very different approach to simply measuring the number of leads or even something as flimsy as “page views”.

3. Success Isn’t Guaranteed, But…

Even though Hopkins insisted that advertising should be viewed on an objective, “scientific” basis he never claimed that every campaign would be a success.  He did say…

“We cannot say that an article will be popular, but we know how to find out very quickly. We do know how to sell it in the most effective way.”

In other words, the beauty of the Direct Response approach is that you know very quickly what’s working and what isn’t.  That then makes marketing tactics fairly simple…

• Stop doing what doesn’t work

• Do more of what does work!

Seems blindingly obvious BUT without having measurable results (the essence of Direct Response Marketing) it’s impossible to do.

In this first chapter of “Scientific Advertising”, Hopkins was essentially laying down the basic principles of what is now known as Direct Response Marketing.  At the time they were a breakthrough.  Today, those same principles are still valid and in the internet age it’s even easier to apply them.

In the next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at advertising as salesmanship and how this could be the one insight that will make the biggest difference to your profits.