Scientific Advertising.

Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins is one of the most consequential books ever written on the theory and practice of advertising, and a work whose influence on American commercial culture has been as lasting as it has been pervasive. The book is cited as the original description of the process of split testing and of coupon-based customer tracking and loyalty schemes, and Hopkins outlines an advertising approach based on testing and measuring, keeping losses from unsuccessful ads to a safe level while multiplying gains from profitable ones. Hopkins argued with characteristic bluntness that advertising exists for one purpose only — to sell — and that any advertisement that cannot be measured, tested, and held accountable for its results is waste masquerading as creativity. In 1908 he was hired by Albert Lasker to write copy for the agency Lord & Thomas at a salary of $185,000 per year, from whose typewriter came campaigns that made a long list of products famous and profitable, including Pepsodent and Palmolive — and who, in the assessment of advertising historian Stephen Fox, invented not merely copywriting in the narrow sense but test marketing, sampling, copy research, brand imaging, and the pre-emption of truth. According to Paul Feldwick, the book has sold over eight million copies — a commercial record that constitutes, in its own right, a proof of the very principles Hopkins spent his career demonstrating.