By Claude C. Hopkins and Troy S. Laughren

© 2005 Troy S. Laughren All Rights Reserved
No part of this 2005 version May be reproduced in any form.

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 analyzed until they are well understood.  The correct method of procedure has been proved and established.  We know what is most effective, and we act on its basic law.

Once a gamble, advertising has become, under able direction, one of the safest business ventures to undertake.  Certainly no other enterprise with comparable possibilities need involve so little risk.

Therefore we will not deal with theories and opinions, but rather, proven principles and facts.  It is presented as a text book for students and a safe guide for advertisers.  Every statement has been weighed and has been confined to establish fundamentals.  If we happen to enter a realm of uncertainty we will carefully denote them.

The present status of advertising is due to many reasons. Much national advertising has long been handled by large organizations known as advertising agencies.  Some of these agencies, in their hundreds of campaigns, have tested and compared thousands of plans and ideas.  The results have been watched and recorded, so no lessons have been lost.

Such agencies employ a high grade of talent.  None but able and experienced people can meet the requirements in national advertising.  Working in co-operation, learning from each other and from each new undertaking, some of these people develop into master advertisers.

Individuals come and go, but they leave their secrets, their records and ideas behind them.  These secrets become a part of the organization's assets, and a guide for all who follow.  Thus, in the course of many decades, such agencies have become storehouses of advertising experiences, proved principles, strategies and tactics.

The larger agencies also come into intimate contact with experts in every department of business.  Their clients are their dominating concern.  So they see the results of countless methods and policies and have become a storage house for every thing pertaining to advertising.  Nearly every selling question which arises in business is accurately answered by many, many experiences.

Under these conditions, where they long exist, advertising and marketing become exact sciences.  Every map has been made.  The compass of accurate knowledge shows the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination.

We learn the principles and prove them by repeated tests. This is done through keyed advertising, by traced returns, largely by the use of coupons.  We compare one way with many others, backward and forward, and record the results.  When one method invariably proves best, that method becomes a fixed principle or baseline for all other tests.

Mail order advertising is tracked down to the fraction of a penny.  The cost per reply and cost per dollar of a sale show up with utter exactness.

One ad is compared with another, one method with another. Headlines, settings, sizes, arguments, copy and pictures are compared. To reduce the cost of results even 1% means a lot in some mail order advertising.  So no guesswork is permitted.  One must know what is best.  Thus mail order advertising first established many of our basic laws.

In lines where direct returns are impossible we compare one town with another.  Scores of methods may be compared in this way, measured by the cost of sales.

But the most common way is by use of the coupon.  We offer a sample, a book, a free package, or something to induce direct replies.  Thus we learn the amount of action which each ad produces.

But those figures are not final.  One ad may bring too many worthless replies, and other replies that are valuable.  So our final conclusions are always based on cost per customer or cost per dollar of sale.

These coupon plans are dealt with further in the chapter on "Test Campaigns" where we explain how we employ them to discover advertising principles, tactics and strategies.

In large agencies coupon returns are watched and recorded on hundreds and hundreds of different lines.  In a single line they are sometimes recorded on thousands of separate ads.  Thus we test everything pertaining to advertising.  We answer nearly every possible question by countless traced returns.

Some things we learn in this way apply only to a particular line or product.  But even those supply basic principles for related undertakings.

Others apply to all lines and products.  They become fundamentals for advertising in general and are universally applied.  No wise advertiser will ever depart from these immutable laws.

 We propose here, to deal with those fundamentals, those universal principles.  To teach only established techniques.  There is technique in advertising, as in all art, science and mechanics.  And it is, as in all lines, a basic essential.

The lack of these fundamentals has been the main problem with advertising of the past.  As each advertiser was a law unto himself, previous advertising knowledge and all progress pertaining to the product or line was a closed book, unattainable.  It was like a person trying to build a modern computer without first finding out what others had done before him.  Every campaign was like Columbus starting out attempting to find an undiscovered land.

People were guided by their whims and fancies – there vagrancy, and rarely arrived at their port.  When they did - by accident - it was by a long roundabout course, instead of by proven principals, strategies and tactics.

Each early mariner in this advertising sea mapped his own new and separate course.  There were no charts, no maps to guide him.  Not a single lighthouse to mark the harbor, not a buoy to show a reef.  The wrecks were unrecorded, so countless ventures came to the same unfortunate fate, crashing into the same rocks and reefs.

Advertising was then a gamble - a speculation of the reckless sort.  One person's guess on the proper course was just as likely to be as good as another's.  There were no safe pilots, because few had sailed the same course twice.

This condition however, has now been corrected.  The only uncertainties pertain to people and products, not to methods.  It is hard to measure human idiosyncrasies, their preferences and prejudices, their likes and dislikes.  We cannot say that an article will be popular, but we do know how to sell it in the most effective way.

Ventures may fail, but the failures are not disasters. Losses, when they occur, are but trivial.   And the causes are factors which have nothing to do with the advertising.

Advertising has flourished under these new conditions.  It has multiplied in volume, in prestige and respect and the perils have been almost eliminated. The results have increased many fold.  The gamble has become a science, and the speculation a very safe business.

These facts should be recognized by all who venture into the advertising and marketing worlds as this is no field for sophistry or theory. The blind leading the blind is ridiculous.  It is pitiful in a field that holds such vast possibilities.  Success is a rarity, and maximum success an impossibility, unless, one is guided by laws as immutable as the law of gravity itself.

So our main purpose here is to set down those laws, and to teach you how to prove them for yourself.  After these immutable laws come a myriad of variations as no two advertising campaigns are ever conducted on lines that are identical.  Individuality is essential, imitation a reproach.  Those variables which depend solely on ingenuity do not have a place in these works on advertising.

Our hope is to foster advertising through realization, through better understanding.  To have it recognized, as among the safest, surest ventures which ultimately lead to larger returns.

Thousands of obvious successes show its possibilities. Their variety points out its almost unlimited scope.  Yet thousands who need it - who can never attain their deserts without it - still look upon its accomplishments as somewhat accidental.

That was so once, but no more.  We hope this information will shed new light on the old subjects of advertising and marketing both in the bricks and mortar world and, the online world.