Last week Rory Sutherland explained on his blog “Why creatives should wear ties occasionally”.  He talked about the relevance of old tried and tested techniques in modern advertising and used the iPhone single page ad as an example of a “perfectly sensible kind of advertising” that is so rare these days.  He described how the ad “contains a large shot of the product so you know what it looks like, carries a headline which discloses a consumer benefit and, ‘…’ contains a series of little captions (old direct marketing hands will know them as “call-outs”) wherein a number of words are arranged in some grammatical order to convey to the reader useful information about what the product does.”

Many of these techniques were invented a long time ago by early direct response pioneers like John Caples and Claude Hopkins, whose book Scientific Advertising I mentioned in my previous post on marketing accountability in 1923.  Over the past few years we have seen a new generation of direct response practitioners emerge.  They combine Hopkins’ and Caples’ relentless focus on results with a thorough understanding of modern web analytics and testing tools. 

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg are great examples of this new breed of marketing practitioners.  They have written extensively on digital consumer persuasion techniques and their blog grokdotcom is full of practical tips on how to improve online conversions through making small changes to your site. 

Bryan Eisenberg recently teamed up with Google to write Always Be Testing, a book on how to get the maximum out of Google Site Optimizer – a free testing software package by Google.  GSO allows the user to test multiple versions of their website automatically and thereby makes testing extremely easy, fast and cheap.  Always Be Testing is packed with tips and suggestions that will get you addicted to testing.  It will change the way you work.

A couple of weeks ago I found a copy of Claude Hopkins’ “Scientific Advertising” as a pdf online.  This book was written in 1923 and it was probably the 1^st book ever written on the application of mathematics in marketing.  If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.  It opens with the following beautiful paragraph :

“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 methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic laws. Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest of business ventures. Certainly no other enterprise with comparable possibilities need involve so little risk.” 

So what on earth has happened to marketing in the last 85 years one would think!  The most recent Jupiter study on CMO priorities of 2009 had “Achieving measurable ROI on marketing efforts” at the top of the list.  Surely this must be a formality by now!

Hopkins was of course talking about direct response communications and since then marketing’s role has expanded.  But even if you look at today’s direct response campaigns by some of the biggest companies in the world it is shocking how many have forgotten about the basic principles the early pioneers of direct response perfected. 

You can download a copy of Scientific Advertising here.  Happy reading!