Stickybeak's review of Scientific Advertising

There are so many good books on marketing and advertising, why would anyone read one written by a man who was born in 1866?

Two good answers to that are that it is very short (it took Stickybeak an hour to read) and the guru of modern advertising David Ogilvy wrote that; "nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until they have read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life”.

It’s basic and very dated, but full of common sense wisdom.  

And when we say ‘dated’ we mean so dated that it was published BEFORE the first TV commercial!  1941 since you asked.

We’re talking marketing foundational text here.

The original version can be a little hard to read because of this, but there are updated versions available to download and it's on Audible too.

Of course we loved that author Claude C Hopkins was a big proponent of testing.

Here are some of his takes on that topic that we love to give you flavour...

1. Headline Testing

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2. Pictures take a lot of space, so test before you commit

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3. Test, test, test.

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4. Testing on a town by town (or with Stickybeak) a country by country basis

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It’s worth a read and definitely one of those books you want visible on your bookcase for Zoom calls.