Founders - #207 Claude Hopkins (Scientific Advertising)

Episode Date: September 26, 2021

What I learned from reading Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. ----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----Individuals come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a guide to all who follow.Genius is the art of taking pains. The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. The best ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They site advantages to users.Remember the people you address are selfish, as we all are. The care nothing about your interests or your profit. They seek service for themselves. Ignoring this fact is a common mistake and a costly mistake in advertising. Ads say in effect, “Buy my brand. Give me the trade you give to others. Let me have the money." That doesn't work.We learn that people judge largely by price. We often employ this factor. Perhaps we are advertising a valuable formula. To merely say that would not be impressive. So we state as a fact that we paid $100,000 for that formula. That statement when tried has won a wealth of respect.The weight of an argument may often be multiplied by making it specific. Makers of safety razors have long advertised quick shaves. One maker advertised a 78-second shave.  The difference is vast. If a claim is worth making, make it in the most impressive way.The product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, and atmosphere, which you place around it. Samples are of prime importance. However expensive, they usually form the cheapest selling method. Samples serve numerous valuable purposes. They enable one to use the word "Free" in ads. That often multiplies readers. Samples pay for themselves in multiplying the readers of your ads.Mail order advertising tells a complete story if the purpose is to make an immediate sale. You see no limitations there on the amount of copy. The motto is, "The more you tell the more you sell." And it has never failed to be proven wrong in any test we know.Show health, not sickness. Don't show the wrinkles you propose to remove, but the face as it will appear. Your customers know all about the wrinkles. Show pretty teeth, not bad teeth. Talk of coming good conditions, not conditions that exist. We are attracted by sunshine, beauty, happiness, health, and success. Point the way to them, not the way out of the opposite.I spend far more time on headlines than on writing. I often spend hours on a single headline. The identical ad run with various headlines differs tremendously in its returns. It is not uncommon for a change in headlines to multiply returns by five or ten times over.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Human nature is perpetual. In most respects, it is the same today as the time of Caesar. So the principles of psychology are fixed and enduring. You will never need to unlearn what you learn about them. We learn, for instance, that curiosity is one of the strongest human incentives. We employ it whenever we can. Puffed wheat and puffed rice were made successful largely through curiosity. For them, we used headlines like, Food shot from guns.

125 million steam explosions caused in every kernel. These foods were failures before that factor was discovered. We learned that people judge largely by price. They are not experts. In the British National Gallery is a painting which is announced in the catalog to have cost $750,000. Most people at first pass it by at a glance. Then later, they learn what the painting cost. They return and surround it.

A department store advertised a $100 hat, and the floor could not hold the women who came to see it. We often employ this factor. Perhaps we are advertising a valuable formula. To merely say that would not be impressive. So we state as a fact that we paid $100,000 for that formula. That statement, when tried, has won a wealth of respect. Many have advertised, try my product for a week. If you don't like it, we'll return your money. Then someone conceived the idea of sending goods without any money down and saying, pay in a week if you like them. That proved many times as impressive.

One great advertising man stated the difference this way. Two men came to see me, each offering me a horse. Both made equal claims. They were good horses. A child could drive them. One man said, try the horse for a week. If my claims are not true, come back for your money. The other man said, try the horse for a week.

But then he added, come and pay me then. I naturally bought the second man's horse. An advertiser offered a set of books to businessmen. The advertising was unprofitable, so he consulted another expert. The ads were impressive. The offer seemed attractive. But, said the second man, let us add one little touch which I have found very effective. Let us offer to put the buyer's name in gold lettering on each book.

That was done, and without another change in the ads, they sold some hundreds of thousands of books. Through some peculiar kink in human psychology, the names in gold gave much added value to the books. In the same way, it is found that an offer limited to a certain class of people is far more effective than a general offer. For instance, an offer limited to veterans of the war, or to members of a lodge, or to executives. Those who are entitled to any seeming advantage will go a long way not to lose that advantage.

An advertiser suffered much from substitution. He said, look out for substitutes, be sure you buy this brand, etc. with no effect. These were selfish appeals. Then he said, try our rivals too in his headlines. He invited comparisons and showed that he did not fear them. That corrected the situation. Buyers were careful to get the brand so conspicuously superior that its maker could court a trial of the rest. There is a great deal in mental impression. Submit five products exactly alike and five people may choose one of them. But point out in one some qualities to notice and everyone will find them. The five people then will all choose the same product.

These are just some examples. There are endless phases to psychology. Some people know them by instinct. Many of them are taught by experience. But we learn most of them from others. When we see a winning method, we note it down for use when the occasion offers. These things are very important. An identical offer made in a different way may bring multiplied returns. That was an excerpt from the chapter on psychology of the book, the biography on Albert Lasker that I just did because Claude and Albert worked together for, I think, like 17 years. Claude Hopkins will sound familiar to you.

It may sound familiar to you because back on Founders Number 170, I read his biography, My Life in Advertising. He is largely regarded as probably the greatest copywriter to ever live. And so I want to pull out this quote from David Ogilvie in his book, Ogilvie in Advertising. And he says, nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It has changed the course of my life. That is very high praise for a very short and very old book. So this book is 100 pages, maybe. And that's being very generous because the chapters go by really fast. It was first written. The story goes that it was first written.

Albert Lasker thought it was too valuable that he locked it away in his vault for 20 years. It was then released and quickly sold a lot of copies since it's been released. I think it was released in the 1920s, 1923, if I'm not mistaken, it sold over 8 million copies. So let's jump right into the beginning of the book. Claude is talking about what is like, what is this book? How did it come about? And every principle that he talks about in the book and the few references he just gave us in the chapter about the unique, weird results from human psychology, just how you twerk one little thing and the results can be vastly different.

None of this is theory. It comes from you're reading the words of a practitioner, somebody that spent 12 hours a day, seven days a week for decades, learning the art of copywriting, of advertising, of sales. And so he says, some of these agencies and their hundreds of campaigns have tested and compared thousands of plans and ideas. All that he learned, he learned from trial and error. The results have been watched and recorded, so no lessons have been lost. Individuals may come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a guide to all who follow. That's a very simple sentence, but a very profound idea.

If you think about it, if you pick up this book, right, and you're reading this book, you're having a one sided conversation with a master of his craft that's been dead almost 100 years. So individuals may come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. I'm holding the record of his ideas of his career in my hand. These become a guide to all who follow. Nearly every selling question which arises in business is accurately answered by many experiences. And the way I interpret that sentence is what you're going through is not unique. People in the past have gone through the same situations. They've run countless different experiences, and most of those lessons are put down in a book. I'm paraphrasing Marc Andreessen on why he reads

so many biographies. You know, there's throughout history, it's thousands of years. It's been really smart people. They ran all these experiments. They've learned all these things. Somebody put them down in a book. We should probably pick up those books and read them, right? The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination. He's giving you the why you would want to read it.

We learn the principles and prove them by repeated tests. We compare one way with many others, backward and forward, and record the results. That's why this book is called Scientific Advertising. It's all about trial and error. I have an hypothesis, I test my assumption, and I record the records. Was that assumption accurate? No. Okay, let me do another test. Was it accurate? Yes. Okay, let's double down on that. When one method invariably proves the best, that method becomes a fixed principle. To reduce the cost of results even 1% means much. So no guesswork is permitted. One must know what is best.

And he gets to the main point, like why so many entrepreneurs and people building products, advertising services, like why is this important? And because our final conclusions are always based on cost per customer. So that was an important concept in Hopkins Day. It's just as important today. When you hear this concept that he's describing, most often you'll hear it as CAC, customer acquisition cost. And the idea behind it is very simple. You should be constantly running experiments on how much does it cost you to get each customer.

And as you continue to run these experiments, that cost should go lower and lower. The lower it goes, the more profitable it will become. And so that's why so many people read books, read this book. And as you continue to run these experiments, that cost should go lower and lower. The lower it goes, the more profitable you become. And so that's why so many people read books, read this book, and use Hopkins principles because they're the foundation on which you can build an extremely profitable business. And in some cases, not only did he make himself wealthy through these principles, but he made countless other clients unbelievably wealthy through these principles. They become fundamentals for advertising in general. They are universally applied. No wise advertiser will ever depart from these unvarying laws. It's very similar to what Ogilvy just said. No one should get close

to your advertising unless they've read this book seven times. We propose in this book to deal with those fundamentals, those universal principles, to teach only established techniques. The lack of those fundamentals has been the main trouble with advertising of the past. Each worker was a law to himself. So what they're saying there or what Claude is saying there is like everybody was running these experiments, but no one was actually comparing the effectiveness. We're collecting all this information and turning it into a scientific process as opposed to just throwing darts against the wall. All previous knowledge, all progress in the line was a closed book to him. So he's saying the advertising man at some point might be running these experiments.

He might be doing failures when he could expedite and improve the effectiveness of his work if he would just learn from the past experience of others, right? It was like a man—and this is a perfect metaphor for that. It was like a man trying to build a modern train without first ascertaining what others had done. And then he talks about the importance of testing your assumptions, right? No one knows if your product is going to succeed or not. This section reminded me a couple of weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago, I read Sid Meyer's autobiography. And he is talking about like, you know, I was making these. He's a computer programmer, one of the first like made one of the first computer programmers that made games.

And he talks about like, you know, I was building all these flight simulators like they were selling. But I really wanted to make this comprehensive, gigantic, like a giant strategy game about the history of human civilization. And conventional wisdom at the time was like, no, don't do that, Sid. Like just no one's going to buy a strategy game. What are you talking about? Just stick to your flight simulators, right? Because they're making money. And he went with his instinct. He's like, well, let me just build it and let me see what happens. Let me test, you know, my assumption. I like this game. Maybe other people like it. That winds up selling over 51 million copies, winds up being his life's work. And so this paragraph reminded me when I read it of what I learned from Sid Meier. It is hard to measure human idiosyncrasies, the preferences and prejudices, the likes and dislikes that exist.

We cannot say that a product will be popular, but we know how to sell it in the most effective way. The blind leading the blind is ridiculous. It is pitiful in a field with such vast possibilities. And so that little dig at the end, blind leading the blind, he's taught, he's compared throughout the book. He compares and contrasts. This is the way I go about my craft. This is the results I've gotten. And these are the people that propose, they think we're in the same industry. They think we're in the same genre, but we're really not because they don't know what we're, what they're actually doing. And so there's a lot of that,

like he's saying, listen, advertising is a admirable field. It can grow larger. If we can show results, stop just guessing, stop doing advertising just for the sake of advertising, actually prove to your customers that it's effective. Now he gets into the main point, what we talked about in Albert Lasker, we talked about in David Olgavy. What is advertising? Advertising is salesmanship. In their days, it was salesmanship in print. It is a way to derive leverage for your business. So you don't have to employ thousands of individual salespeople. So the note of myself is advertising is salesmanship leveraged. To properly understand advertising or to learn even its rudiments, one must start with the right conception. Advertising is salesmanship. Its principles are the principles of salesmanship. Therefore, every advertising question should be answered by the salesman's standards.

Let us emphasize that point. The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales. Treat it as a salesman. Force it to justify itself. Figure its cost and result. Accept no excuses. Then you will not go wrong. The difference is only in degree. Advertising is multiplied salesmanship.

It may appeal to thousands while the salesman talks to one. And so that's another illustration of the point that I made in the Lasker podcast, where he wrote a bunch of different ways. He found ways to leverage, to exploit leverage. One of them is the fact that he only dealt with a handful of clients. He built strong relationships with them. He wind up having access to extremely large advertising budgets, but he gets a percentage of that. And he was able to increase the advertising budget because he was the first person to realize, hey, instead of just being a broker,

why don't we actually do the creative aspect, show that our copywriting, combine our copywriting with the leverage that advertising in newspaper and magazines gives us, this will increase the amount of sales that our customers get. As they increase the amount of sales, this will increase the amount of sales that our customers get. As they increase the amount of sales, they'll increase the advertising budget and we'll make more. And so in a sense, you could think of Albert Lasker as just straddling these two points of leverage and using them to build an enormous personal fortune.

A salesman's mistake may cost little. An advertiser's mistake may cost thousands of times that much. Be cautious. A mediocre salesman may affect a small part of your trade. Mediocre advertising affects all of your trade. So there's a bunch going on this page. Do a small test before spending a large amount. Selling in person is valuable experience. So a lot of the insights that door-to-door salesmen would learn, Claude applied that to advertising in print. Ogilvy also did this. He sold door-to-door salesmen would learn. Claude applied that to advertising in print. Ogilvy also did this. He sold door-to-door a bunch of like stove, like some kind of oven, and then used those insights for when he was building his own advertising firm.

I'm still reading my note to you. Write as if the person was in front of you, the more you tell, the more you sell. Okay, so let's see what's going on here. Many of the ablest men in advertising are graduate salesmen. The best we know have been house-to-house salespeople. They may know little of grammar, nothing of rhetoric, but they know how to use words that convince. A fair answer to those questions avoids countless mistakes. But when one tries to show off, so their whole point is like, there's a lot of people in the industry that are trying to win awards or trying to entertain. He's like, no, we're all about sales. And so a lot of these insights that we're applying, like when the person was going

door to door trying to sell something, a vacuum cleaner, a stove, a bunch of knives, whatever they were selling at the point, they weren't trying to entertain you. Like it wouldn't have worked. Like their time is limited. They have to convince you to hand over some money or they can't keep doing that. So Claude's point here is like, listen, think about, treat it as if that person, that prospect is standing in front of you. And so if you think about it like that, it's like, before I write this word or the sentence or this paragraph, would it help a salesman sell the goods? Would it help me sell them if I met a buyer in person? And so his point is, if you answer those questions, if you're able to answer those

questions correctly, it avoids countless mistakes. And so stick to that. And he says, when one tries to show off or does things merely to please, he is little likely to strike a chord which leads people to spend money. And he continues this. Some people say, be very brief. People will read for little. Would you say that to a salesman? So this whole thing is just treat your ad as if you're on an individual basis, right? Would you say that to a salesman?

With a prospect standing before him, would you confine him to any certain number of words? That would be an unthinkable handicap. So don't do it in your ads. So in advertising, the only readers we get are people whom are subject interest. No one reads ads for amusement, long or short. Consider them as prospects standing before you seeking information. Give them enough information to get action. So with countless questions, measure them by salesman standards, not by amusement standards and this is something he repeats over and over again this is one of the greatest advertising faults ad

writers abandon their parts they forget they are salesmen and try to be performers instead of sales they seek applause and so he goes back to this idea it's like everything we do is based on an individual level right um this is something that steve jobs said i was like well how are you you know apple in the 70s late 70s early 80s like you're. I was like, well, how are you? You know, Apple in the 70s, late 70s, early 80s. Like you're just a you sell to consumers. How are you going to expand your market and sell to businesses? And Jobs is just like corporations are just collections of individuals. So just treat them as individuals. He applied that to the market for his computers.

Hopkins is applying that to add to advertising. Don't think of people in the mass. That gives you a blurred view. Think of a typical individual who is likely to want what you sell. Then he talks about the importance of research. The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. His success largely depends on doing that to the exclusion of everything else.

And then this is also something we've mentioned multiple times, not only in the Lasker podcast, but also the podcast with the Ogilvy podcast as well. It's this idea where you'll see these ads forever. They're written from the point of the perspective of a company. And people are self-interested. They're not, they don't care what you're, what you made. They want to know how it affects them. And so he says, some ads are planned and written with a totally wrong conception. They are written to please the seller. The interests of the buyer are forgotten.

One can never sell goods profitably in person or in print when that attitude exists. And so Claude's solution to this is you should be offering service. You should be telling, if you want somebody to give you money, you have to start with what service am I offering you? What am I doing for you, for you to give me your money? Not just, hey, buy my brand. No one cares about you, right? No one cares about the company or the product.

They have their own problems. Remember the people you address are selfish, as we all are. They care nothing about your interests or your profit. They seek service for themselves. This is why Henry Ford has that famous quote that money comes naturally as a result of service. First, you find a way to serve people. And then the trade that you give to others. Let me have the money. This is not a popular appeal. The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. The ads are based entirely on service. Good ads, he means. They offer wanted information. They cite advantages to users. Some of these ads may seem altruistic, but they are based on the knowledge of human nature. The writers know how people are led to buy. Here again is salesmanship.

The good salesman does not merely cry a name. He doesn't say, buy my product. A brushmaker, so he's giving an example of somebody going door to door trying to sell brushes. Okay. And this is all ties to like the human psychology that you present similar things in a slightly different way and you get varying different results. A brush maker has 2000 door to door salespeople. He's enormously successful in an industry which would seem very difficult. Okay. So how did he do it? And it would be if his men asked the housewives to buy. So they knock on the door, hey, buy my brush. But they don't. They go to the door and say, I was sent here to give you a brush. I have samples here and I want you to take one of your choice. Okay. So they're giving away, they're saying, hey, I have a brush,

been sent here, pick the one you want. The housewife is all smiles and attention. In picking the one brush, she sees several that she wants. She is anxious to reciprocate the gift so the salesman gets an order. I think it's the reciprocity principle. Munger talks about this. It's well-known and it's a phenomenon in psychology. There's a famous book that a lot of entrepreneurs read. It's The Psychology of Influence by Robert Chiodini, I think is his name. But essentially the phenomenon is playing out in this example. It's not, hey, knock on your door, buy a brush.

They're going to slam the door. Maybe you get 10% of the customers you would otherwise. But saying, hey, I have a brush. No obligation. Pick the one you want. She picks the brush. Then she's like, oh, wait. It's the natural instinct for humans.

Like once somebody does favor to reciprocate that favor. And that's why this phenomenon also you see in, I think, I don't know if it was in Chialdini's book that I learned this. I forgot where I heard this, but you see this in people asking for donations. Like the people at the airport,

you'd see them where they used to be, uh, they're in like, they're like monks, they're in robes. It's, uh, like Harry Krishna or something like that.

What these people would do. And it wound up working marvelously. Somebody did like an in-depth research on how much money they were making, making hundreds of millions of dollars a year doing this. They would like hand somebody like a flower or something like that. Uh, like, uh,

or like a rose petals, whatever it was i can't remember exactly was they'd hand it to you first then ask for a donation and it you know like doubles or triples the effectiveness somebody that was doing this research winds up finding out like they went up tracking what they were doing so a person would be handed a flower right uh maybe they give them a buck or two or whatever it was then they'd walk around the corner and they throw the flower in the trash. The guy or the person doing the analysis of this sales method realized that the Harry Kirshners had it down so much that they knew that likely after they gave them the gift, they'd throw it away.

So they would recycle the flowers by going through the trash and picking them back up and reusing them. So, again, this is just something like a fundamental kink of human psychologists used over and over again that works all the time. So that's why you see so many brands giving free samples, free trials, free demonstrations first before asking for money. And so he'll give us different examples of different products using the same principle. The maker of an electric sewing machine found advertising difficult. And he found advertising difficult because he's saying, hey, buy my machine. Doesn't work. So on good advice, he ceased soliciting a purchase. He offered to send to any home a sewing machine for one week's use free of charge, no

obligation. OK, with it would come a man to show how to operate it. Let us help you for a week without cost or obligation, said the ad. Such an offer was resistless and about nine in 10 of the trials led to sales. So think about what he's saying. He's like the same exact, from the product maker's perspective, it's the same, you're going after the same thing. I want to sell more of my product, right? I try option one, throw an ad, look at this as a product, look what it does for you, buy my product, right? Uh, and then that limits, you know, you're not getting a lot of sales. Option two, hey, I have such faith in my product.

Let me serve you for a week without cost or obligation. And I wound up closing 90% of the people that respond. This is why I said in, um, in in the previous podcast, this stuff to me is just indistinguishable from magic. So it says, these are all common principles of salesmanship. The most ignorant peddler applies them, yet the salesman in print very often forgets them. He talks about his interests. So again, Hopkins is going to repeat, he's got a few main principles here, and he's going to repeat the same stuff over and over again so it gets to our thick skulls. People are self-interested. Don't forget this is what he's telling us. People do whatever they do to please

themselves. Many fewer mistakes would be made in advertising if these facts were never forgotten. And now we see like why books like this would sell 8 million copies because when you study what works you realize there's huge variance in results And it's the difference between going bankrupt and becoming wealthy. A man who was selling a $5 product, the replies, this is a direct mail order product. The replies from his ad cost him 85 cents. Another man submitted an ad, which he thought was better. The replies started to cost $14.20. So if I sell something for five bucks and each cost of sale costs makes me only cost me 85 cents, I can get wealthy if there's enough people that want that product. Right. But if I'm selling something for five bucks and it costs $14 to get you kind, I'm out of the game

real fast. Another man submitted an ad, which for two years brought replies of an average of 41 cents each. So that's his also point where the main point is, hey, there's ads that work. Do not stop pulling them right before they work or before the effectiveness diminishes. And sometimes you can ads can run for a decade, two decades. And the way to think about that is the aphorism from Ogilvy, where he's like, listen, you're not advertising to a standing army. You're advertising to a moving parade now. But that doesn't mean when you find a new, an ad that works that you stop experimenting and trying to improve the effectiveness of your advertising, which is what Hopkins is telling us right here. Listen, this dude, this guy was making, he's making good money because his ads, he's

getting a customer for 85 cents and he's selling for five bucks. But then they did another test and they realized, hey, now each ad, excuse, now each customer is costing me half that much. Now it's not $0.85, it's $0.41. And this is where Hopkins ties it all together for us. Consider the difference on a quarter million replies per year in this guy's business. Well, he's saving half the cost on 250,000 replies a year. And he's going to talk to us about this huge variance in results. Some people were paying for sales from two to 35 times what they needed to cost before Hopkins started writing ads for them, right? They were paying two to 30.

So my ad, what he's saying is my writing was they were paying the people that they hired previously were charging them double to 35 times more than the effectiveness of my advertising. And what if they were making a profit at 35 X, right? And now he found a way to reduce their costs by 35 times. That's insane. A study of mail order advertising reveals many things worth learning. If continued, you know that it pays. Study those ads with respect. It is proven advertising, not theoretical. It will not deceive you. The lessons it teaches are principles which wise men apply to all advertising. And so now he goes back to this idea where everybody tells you it has to be a short ad. He's like, no, our testing reveals the opposite. Mail order advertising tells a complete story if the purpose is to make an immediate sale.

You see no limitations there on the amount of copy. The motto here is the more you tell, the more you sell. And it has never failed to be proven wrong in any test we know. And at this point in his career, he's done thousands, maybe tens of thousands of tests. So he goes back to this idea. You should be studying successful ads. Look at the ad for the Mead Cycle Company. So they're selling bicycles.

These ads have been running for many years. The ads don't change. Mr. Mead told the writer, meaning him, Hopkins is funny, he's always referencing the writer. It's like there's a way to say himself. Mr. Mead told me that not for $10,000 would he change a single word in his ads. For many years years he compared one ad with the other and the ads you see today are the final results of those experiments you may not like them you may say they're unattractive crowded or hard to read anything you will but

the test of the but the test of results has proved that those ads are the best salesmen those lines have yet discovered and they pay. And so that's another way for him to just pound into this or expound on this point that he makes over and over again. Like, you've got to test your assumptions. You cannot assume that you are correct. Just prove it. And he's like, the way to test assumption is not around a table and an office in a meeting. So they just run a test and then do it again uh so says now he's now he's talking about the importance of headlines and we're already over a third away through about a third away through the book it's written very quickly like he does not there's no like fluff in this book whatsoever uh so says um the importance of headlines like if you can't get somebody's

attention the headline is the vehicle to get somebody's attention right and you can't sell somebody that's just not paying attention to you. And so if you have a problem, the problem he's trying to solve is, listen, ads can be ignored and the right headline is what solves this problem. People do not read ads for amusement. They don't read ads, which at a glance seem to offer nothing interesting to them. Always bear that fact in mind. People are hurried. The average person worth cultivating has too much to read. They skip three fourths of the paper, which they are paying to get newspapers. They are not going to read your business, your business talk unless you make it worth their while and let the headline show it.

So don't bury the lead. Right. And so he's going to tell like the headline is the most important part. The writer of this chapter, meaning me again, spends far more time on headlines than on writing the ad. He often spends hours on a single headline. Often scores of headlines are discarded before the right one is selected. The identical ad run with various headlines differs tremendously in its returns. It is not uncommon for a change in headlines to multiply returns by five or ten

times over. So then he gets into more specifics. And one of his specifics is be specific. He's like, don't talk about don't avoid platitudes. Don't use generalizations. They're so commonly used like they have no meaning. Pick a freaking number don't you don't say i'm the best in the world everybody knows this and that's not true platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck they leave no impression whatsoever to say best in the world lowest price in existence etc is at best simply claiming the expected and it also can lead people to not believe you uh they lead readers to discount all the statements that you make a man inclined to superlatives must expect that his every statement will be taken with some lead people to not believe you. They lead readers to discount all the statements that you make. A

man inclined to superlatives must expect that his every statement will be taken with some caution. But a man who makes a specific claim is either telling the truth or not. A definitive claim is usually accepted. Actual figures are not generally discounted. Specific facts, when stated, have their full weight in effect. The weight of an argument may often be multiplied by making it specific. That's the most important sentence in this chapter. The weight of an argument may often be multiplied by making it specific. A dealer may say our prices have been reduced without creating any impression at all. But when he says our prices have been reduced 25%, he gets the full value of his announcement. A mail order advertiser

sold women's clothing. For years, he used the slogan lowest price in America. His rivals all copied that. These claims became so common to every advertiser that they became commonplace and thus far not effective, right? Then under Abel advice, he changed his statement to our net profit is 3%. So he's saying lowest price in America, it doesn't work. Our net profit is 3%, a specific example. That was a definitive statement and it proved very impressive. No one could be expected to do business on less than 3%. The next year, the business made a sensational increase.

So he's talking about there's a lot of these industries where everybody's advertising the competition is brutal competition is brutal and so you've got to use specific uh one way to stand out is using specific claims so he's talking about shaving soaps right shaving soaps have long been advertised abundant lather does not dry on the face acts quickly so okay but everybody uses those claims so they're they they're not effective so a new a new entrant comes into the field uh says a new maker came into the field he said multiplies itself in lather 250 times softens your beard in one minute maintains its creamy fullness for 10 minutes on your face and his advertising was wildly successful these are all specific claims in a sea of sameness right

he's going to give us a bunch of examplesers of safety razors have long advertised quick shaves. And then one maker advertised a 78 second shave. He gets the business. Use the world over is a very elastic claim. A lot of products say that. Then one advertiser said, my product is used by peoples of 52 nations. He gets the business. And so he wraps up this chapter here. The difference is vast. If a claim is worth making, make it in the most impressive way. So now he's going to talk about,

he says the headline of the chapter is tell your full story. And this is about the more you sell, the more you tell. It doesn't mean you go on and just make it 10,000 words if you can tell the full story in 2,000. The point is like,

you're not going to get their attention many times. So tell your full story. And if you can do that in 2,000 words, do it in 2,000 words. If you can do it in 500, do it in 500. But don't be like, oh, I have 280 characters and then I'm done. Like, no, that's not, you're wasting your advertising money. When once you get a person's attention, then is the time to accomplish all you ever hoped to do with him. Bring all your good arguments to bear. Cover every phase of your subject. One fact appeals to some, one to another. Omit anyone, and a certain percentage will lose the fact which might convince. People are not apt to read successive advertisements. No more than you read a news item twice or a story twice. In one reading of an advertisement, one decides for or against a

proposition. So present the reader once you get them every important claim you have. This is why he reduces everything he's saying here to the more you sell, the more you tell. The best advertisers do that. Gradually, they accumulate a list of claims important enough to use, and all those claims appear in every ad thereafter. Some advertisers go so far as to never change their ads. This is what I just referenced earlier. Some mail order ads have been running year after year without diminishing returns. I think the example Ogilvy uses in his books is like, you know, it's very common. Like when people get married, they get a house.

And so maybe you're your client, you're selling washing machines, right? And you realize that newlyweds are a large aspect of that market. Well, guess what? People get married this year, they're going to get married next year, and they're going to marry 10 years from now. Those people will probably want washing machines too. So don't change the ad is the specific example. I'm pretty sure he used in his book. The constant returns come from getting new readers in every ad. Consider only new customers. People using your product are not reading your ads. They've already read and have decided any reader of your ad is interested. Else he would not he or she would not be a reader. You are dealing with someone willing to listen. So do your level best. That reader, if you lose them now, may never again be a reader. Okay, so now this is really interesting. The way to think about what he's explaining to us here is sell painkillers, not vitamins. And this principle applies, these are notes I wrote to myself,

this principle applies to which benefit you choose to highlight and how to make the market for the same product bigger. Costy mistakes are made by blindly following some ill-conceived idea. A product, for instance, may prevent a disease. Prevention is not a popular subject, however much it should be. It's admirable, but people do not respond to it, is what he's telling us. People will do much to cure trouble, but people in general will do little to prevent it. This has been proved by many disappointments. Sell painkillers, not vitamins. And he talks about using this concept

in what you choose to show to a toothpaste may prevent may tend to prevent decay. It may also beautify teeth. Tests will show that the latter appeal, meaning I have if you use my product, you'll have beautiful teeth, right, is waste is many times as strong as the former, meaning that it's preventing decay. The most successful toothpaste advertiser never features tooth troubles in his headlines. They show the desired effect, beautiful, bright, sparkling white teeth. A soap may tend to cure eczema. It may at the same time improve complexion. So this is what I mean about you have to be very careful about choosing the benefit that you're promising

to your customer because you may be artificially limiting the amount of customers you can get. So you may have prevented, or excuse me, you may have invented a cure for eczema, but it's also, as a byproduct of that, improves your complexion. Do not advertise it as a cure for eczema. The eczema claim may appeal to one in a hundred, while the beauty claims would appeal to nearly all. To even mention the eczema claims might destroy the beauty claims. Then he goes into what it takes to get really good at what he's doing. And he's like, listen, you got to put in.

Most people are not willing to put in the work. There's no substitute for the hard work and the time and the effort.'re gonna have to read and say he talks about like before you can advertise a product you gotta really study and and understand it sometimes this process can take weeks sometimes it's take months let me use an example of ogivee he had he he got the rolls royce account and i think it was like three weeks of reading thousands of pages, and he came across this random line in, I think it was like an engineering handbook for Rolls-Royce, like an internal handbook. And it said, at 60 miles an hour,

the loudest noise in the news for Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. He used that as his headline. And it came from research. So this is what Hopkins is saying the same thing. An ad writer to have any chance of success must gain full information

on a subject. The library of an ad agency should have books on every product that calls for research. A painstaking advertising man will often read for weeks on some problem which comes up.

Perhaps in many volumes, he will find few facts to use. But in some, one fact may be the keynote of success, which is the Rolls Royce Ogilvy example, right? Now, this is crazy because I feel like I've been quoting Izzy Sharp a lot since I learned about what he said. And so this is Hopkins. Genius is the art of taking pains. The advertising man who spares the midnight oil will never get very far.

Izzy, Izzy Sharp, as he's building Four Seasons, right? One of the premier luxury brands the world's ever seen. He said, excellence is often the capacity of taking pains. So that's what Izzy said. What Claude said, genius is the art of taking pains. And he wraps up saying this is not for the lazy. The uninformed would be staggered to know the amount of work involved in a single ad, weeks of work sometimes. The ad seems so simple and it must be simple to appeal to simple people. But behind that ad may lie reams of data, of information and months of research this is no lazy man's field

uh skipping ahead he also got a way where he could just we talked about this this uh idea you got business or just collections of people you start with the individual and he just has a way to just express ideas and you know one or two sentences we must consider individuals we cannot go after thousands of men until we learn how to win one this is the idea that a demo a sample it's just the best sales technique that's ever been invented there's not there's nothing better way to sell your product he used the example of the guy with the horse or the electric typewriter whatever that machine was sewing machine rather And so there's an entire chapter. Use samples.

It multiplies the effectiveness of your ads. It pays for itself many times over. People don't do this because they're like, oh, I'm giving away my product, or how do I afford to pay for it? It's like you afford to pay for it in the sales that happen in the future as a result of them using your product. The product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression and atmosphere

which you place around it. Samples are of prime importance. However expensive, they usually form the cheapest selling method. Samples serve numerous valuable purposes. They enable one to use the word free in your ads. That, and why is that important? Because if you can use the word free, that multiplies readers. The samples pay for themselves in multiplying the readers of your ads.

So his point is, if you have two identical products, or two identical ads for the same product, one headline talks about you get something free, the other headline doesn't, way more people are going to read the one that says free. And so therefore, the demo pays for itself because it increases the effectiveness. How many people actually read the ad, the more people read it, the more people buy. But his point is you don't give just like you don't just mass mail samples of your product to just random people.

They have to ask for it. And he's like, you're cheapening it if it just shows up on the door without any kind of introduction to the client. And so you should introduce your product in a favorable way using the demo as almost like a leveraged salesperson, right? So you introduce your product in a favorable way and you do that through storytelling. And the story obviously comes from your ad. He says, the product is cheapened if it is not introduced in a favorable way. Many advertisers do not understand this. They supply thousands of samples to dealers to be handed out as they will. You should give samples to interested people only. They should ask for it. Right. Give them only to people who exhibit that interest by some effort. Give them only to people whom you have told your story. Now he goes into the importance of testing. We're towards the end of the book already. This is, it just goes by really, really quick. Like this book,

you can read definitely in a day, you know, maybe definitely over a weekend easily, depending on how many notes, how much notes and time you have. But this is just the summary is the world is full of surprises and always has been and always will be there are many surprises in advertising a project you will laugh at may make a great success a project you are sure of may fall down all because tastes differ so much none of us know enough people's desires to get an average viewpoint so the solution is to test and the test sometimes proves hey i saved you money because i thought it was gonna be successful i'm not and in other cases you get a surprisingly massive response that you didn't expect uh we let the thou and he talks

about like cap your downside right don't just do don't don't have an idea and i'm like i'm putting my entire advertising budget on this idea cap your downside and then test uh he repeats this because many spend a lot without testing first and they go broke so he's saying instead of going before i go nationwide i'll test my ad maybe in a few different markets and I'll cap it at a couple of thousand dollars. So if that doesn't work out, usually I get most of the money back, if not all the money back. But if it doesn't work out, I say, you know, I spent a couple of thousand instead of a couple of millions and then putting the company in jeopardy. We let the thousands decide what the millions will do. We make a small venture and watch the cost and the result. When we

learn what a thousand customers cost, we know almost exactly what a million will cost. When we learn what they buy, we know what when we know what the thousands buy, we will know what the millions will buy. From the few thousands, we learn what the millions will do. So he talks about the people testing. He is playing on the safe side of a hundred to one shot. If the product is successful, it may make him millions. If he's mistaken about it, the loss is trifle. So I kind of just ran over my own point there or Claude's point there rather.

These are facts we desire to emphasize and spread. So he's like, stop doing. I've seen a bunch of people do a bunch of dumb shit. Don't repeat their mistakes. These people go out of business. There's no reason for that is what he's telling us. All of our largest accounts are now built in this way from very small beginnings. Reiterates his point, even if you have a great campaign, that you never stop testing, ever.

Costs can always go lower, so you got to keep running these tests. We do test campaigns to try out new methods on already successful advertising. Thus, we constantly seek better methods without interrupting already proven plans. If in five years for one food advertiser, we tried over 50 separate tests. Every little while, we found an improvement. So the result of our advertising constantly grew. At the end of five years, we found the best plan of all. It reduced our cost of selling by 75%. So you already had an effective ad campaign. Now you found something that you weren't expecting and you did this through testing, through trial and error. It has now reduced your cost by 75%. Congratulations,

you're wealthy. That is, it was four times more effective than the best plan used before. Try out plan after plan after plan to constantly reduce the cost. So then he's talking here, you should be advertising the result. People do not buy products, they buy solutions. Show health, not sickness. Don't show the wrinkles you propose to remove, but the face as it will appear. Your customers know all about wrinkles. Show pretty teeth, not bad teeth. Talk of coming good conditions, not conditions that exist. We are all attracted by sunshine, beauty, happiness, health, and success. Point the way to them, not the way out of the opposite.

Advertise the result is a way to think about what he's telling us here. He's going to give another example of how you stand out. So you got a bunch of people all trying to go after the same customers with similar products. You can differentiate just the way you, by proposing your solution. And this is the sales technique of the century. This is what Estee Lauder built her massive business empire out of. Last time I looked, you know, she's been dead for quite a while.

She started that business in her 40s. I think it's somewhere in the founders 130 somewhere in there where i did her auto read her autobiography she's completely slept on as a overlooked as an entrepreneur if you could reincarnate her today bring her back she'd be kicking almost every other entrepreneur's ass she was extremely extremely gifted last time i looked uh her the company was doing something like 18 billion dollars in revenue some some more ridiculous number like that right but she talked about one of the keys to her success is the gift with purchase which she referenced the reason i

referenced this is in her autobiography which is extremely easy to read by the way and full of useful information uh she says that was the sales technique of the century it's what the cornerstone she built her found her empire off of she did not give away free samples. You bought something and then she gave you an extra gift and that caused you coming back and back and endured this goodwill that she cultivated over the entire lifetime of that customer. And so this is a way to stand out where we see somebody using that idea a couple of decades she did, right? A mail order advertiser offered a catalog. The inquirer might send out for three or four similar catalogs, okay? So I have a catalog, but there's three or four other companies that have a catalog too. He had that competition,

so he had competition making a sale. So he wrote a letter when he sent his catalog and enclosed a personal card. So you have not purchased anything yet, right? You've inquired, you say you want my catalog. I'm going to send you the catalog, just like my three or four competitors do, but I'm going to differentiate myself. I'm going to stand out by giving you a personal card. And this is what I write. You are a new customer and we want to make sure you are welcome. So when you send your order, please enclose this card. The writer wants to see that you get a gift with the order, something you can keep. That is Estee Lauder's sales technique of the century. That is a gift with purchase is what he's saying. And so now Hopkins is analyzing the psychology

behind this simple little card that magnified this person's sales and had him out-compete people that are very similar to him. The offer aroused curiosity. It gave preference to his this simple little card that magnified this person's sales and had him out-compete people that were very similar to him. The offer aroused curiosity. It gave preference to his catalog. Without some compelling reason for ordering elsewhere, the customer would send the order to him. The gift paid for itself several times over by bringing larger sales per catalog. Now, that's wild. Check this out. The gift paid for itself several times over by bringing larger sales per catalog in in her excuse me my voice is going uh in her autobiography she talks about she's like i'm not she reduced her advertising budget and because they had a

limited amount of money at the beginning of the company right so she reduces her advertising budget and she says instead of spending money in advertising let's spend money on more product manufacturing more products that we can give away and what she found was that the gift with purchase, spending every dollar that she spent on giving away stuff, as opposed to advertising, like it outperformed the money spent on advertising. And so that's, these people would constantly be coming back. And so I just thought that was like a very interesting idea. It's like, okay, I'm going to limit how much I'm spending on advertising, and I'm just going to cultivate my already existing customer base. And they're going to grow because now they come back, but they an investment, or even maybe you think about as marketing or advertising, whatever you want to put on it. The gift paid, the marketing paid, the advertising paid for itself several times over by bringing larger sales per catalog. And then he closes with the chapter called Good Business.

And he's just talking about like the stuff we've talked about here. It's just the very beginning days. It's only going to grow more important with time. A rapid stream ran. And this is a very fascinating analogy that really, in my mind, crystallized what he's telling us. A rapid stream ran by my boyhood home. The stream turned a wooden wheel and the wheel ran a mill. Under that primitive method, all but a fraction of the stream's potential went to waste.

Then someone applied scientific methods to the stream, put in a turbine and dynamos. Now, with no more water, no more power, it runs a large manufacturing plant. We think of that stream when we see wasted advertising power, and we see it everywhere. Hundreds of examples, enormous potentials, millions of circulation used to turn a mill wheel while others use that same power with manifold effect. And that is just a perfect analogy to end it. You're advertising the way you market to customers. You can be the same stream, right? You can have a wooden wheel and you can run a mill or you can have a turbine and dynamos and you can run a manufacturing plant. That sentence, while others use that same

power with manifold effect. And that is where I'll leave it. I think it's a no-brainer to buy this book. You can buy the paperback version. I think it's less than $10. It's insane. But if you buy, if you're interested in reading his autobiography, The My Life in Advertising, if you go on Amazon and search for the Kindle version, you can find a version of his autobiography where you get this scientific advertising book for free as well. But in either case, whether you read the autobiography or you, I would read this book no matter what.

I do think the autobiography is also interesting because it talks about the lessons that are in this book applied to his actual life. And I'm pretty sure this founder's 170. If you haven't gone back to listen to that, I will leave a link in the show notes if you want to support the podcast at the same time and buy the book, use that link. That is 207 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.