Scientific Advertising

Why a 1923 Book Still Owns the Internet

There is a book from 1923 sitting on the desks of more growth marketers than any single growth book published in the last decade. It is eighty-something pages long. It was written by a Scotch-American copywriter who quit the ministry to advertise cough syrup, who taught himself by handing out pamphlets at age nine, and who once made the equivalent of millions of dollars writing ads in a cabin in the Michigan woods. The book is called Scientific Advertising. Its author, Claude C. Hopkins, never lived to see a banner ad, a Google search, or a Facebook split-test, and yet every Facebook split-test in the world is essentially a Hopkins experiment with a faster feedback loop.

That is the strange thing about this book. It reads like an artifact and works like a manual. Hopkins is talking about pork and beans, carpet sweepers, cigars sent through the mail, and tooth paste sold on coupons clipped from the Ladies' Home Journal. The tactics belong to a museum. The principles are doing your job for you right now whether you know it or not. The entire discipline of performance marketing, the entire vocabulary of A/B testing, attribution, conversion optimization, headline testing, offer reversal, and customer acquisition cost has its DNA in this single small book.

Hopkins is direct, slightly contemptuous of bad work, allergic to fluff, and willing to tell you in the first chapter that ninety-five percent of his customers are common people because he does not know how the rich think. He earned a hundred thousand dollars a year writing copy in the 1910s, and he did it by being right about what worked and ruthless about discarding what did not. This is the summary of what he figured out.