Scientific Advertising

Ninety pages, written in 1923, readable in an evening. Ogilvy said nobody should be allowed to touch advertising until they had read it seven times and he was not being cute.

Hopkins made advertising measurable. Coupon codes, split tests, tracking which version of an ad produced a sale. Before him it was taste and after him it was arithmetic.

What has aged best is his refusal to let you say a product is the best. He makes you say the number instead. His Schlitz campaign did not claim the beer was purer than anybody else's, it described the steam cleaning of the bottles in detail, and every brewer in America was doing exactly the same thing. Nobody had bothered to say it, so Schlitz owned it. That is most of what we do organically. Show the real thing, say the real number, do it again next week, and in six and a half months it did 136.8 million views with nothing behind it.