Ran across my old copy of “Scientific Advertising,” written
by one of the pioneers of the business, Claude Hopkins. The author had passed
on, but the flyleaf has the autographs of three other advertising icons of the time
of this re-issue (mid-1950s). The
instructor of one of my advertising courses had used his connections to invite an
industry executive to address the class, and to bring copies of the book.
It had originally been written in 1923, so it contains the mailorder
strategy advice “a two-cent [postage] letter gets no more attention than a
one-cent letter” and some other lines we see as inadvertent humor 90 years on.
There’s the reference to “soulless corporations,” for example. How could the
author have anticipated that one day corporations would be people? (Whether
that also imbues them with souls I haven’t seen debated yet, but if it should
be judged in the future to be advantageous to increasing profits -- why not?)
HOWEVER -- some of the
book’s advice is timeless.
The premise is (1) marketing is about sales and nothing but
sales; (2) one of its techniques, advertising, can be tested and the results
measured; and (3) any marketing effort that can’t be measured in terms of sales
is, in the author’s word, “folly.”
I’ve railed loudly and often, here and in Internet debate,
against “content marketing” and its “storytelling” and “agnostic” content, but here’s
support from beyond the grave. Page 60: “This is all in the line of general
publicity so popular long ago. Casting bread upon the waters and hoping for its
return. Most advertising was of that sort twenty years ago.”
He’s discussing general display materials, whose
characteristics can be compared reasonably to today’s “content,” and it’s dismissed as already twenty years out
of date. I remind us, the author was writing in 1923. That’s just five
years after we defeated the Kaiser. I rest my case.
