Science, Inspiration And The Birth of Modern Marketing
In 1907, an advertising executive by the name of Claude Hopkins invited friends to an expensive Chicago restaurant to celebrate his retirement. After years of intense campaigns and marketing innovation, Hopkins was ready quit the world of advertising. However, before the second course arrived, a message arrived at their table.
Mr. A. D. Lasker of Lord & Thomas requests you to call on him this afternoon.
Albert Lasker was the most famous advertising executive of the day and, although he didn’t know it yet, Hopkins was about to be made an irresistible offer. The very next day, Hopkins travelled to Indianapolis as the world’s highest-paid copywriter, and began a career with Lasker’s advertising firm that lasted for 16 more years.
The “Age of Optimisation”
Before explaining why Claude Hopkins was worth the enormous sums Lasker was willing to pay him, here is a second story to consider. It, too, concerns science, inspiration and the curious world of marketing.
In 2009, something unusual happened at Google. Fed up with the way his innovative graphical work was being managed, the company’s first ever Visual Designer resigned. Douglas Bowman explained his reasons in an open letter.
When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favour? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralysing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. (1)
Bowman argued that the company had prioritised engineering over creativity. It would have been hard to argue with him; in the months leading up to the resignation, Google had been conducting tests to find the perfect colour for the links on their results pages. The experiment involved testing 41 separate shades of blue on randomly selected users.
Bowman felt that the world of design had become consumed by engineers: inspiration had been crushed by the relentless pursuit of evidence. In fact, what he had observed was something quite different. Google’s experimentation had begun a new era of design. Rather than bold sweeping shifts, carefully measured iterations had begun to determine what the future looked like. Bowman had witnessed the birth of A/B testing.
2020 A/B
Most people are never aware of having come into contact with an A/B Test. And yet, this simple process has had a dramatic effect on the modern world. From winning elections and reshaping the economy, to building the web-spaces through which we communicate, A/B testing has enrolled each of us in a vast and continuing experiment.
Put simply, an A/B test involves comparing one version of something against another. All you need is a hypothesis and a way of measuring performance. Two versions (“A” and “B”) of a website, campaign slogan or advertisement are created, and their performance is tracked. Once the difference in performance is statistically significant, the test is complete.
In the years after Bowman’s resignation, Google spearheaded an enormous proliferation of online experimentation. This chart of Google searches for A/B testing shows how the method has increased in popularity.
International companies run hundreds of A/B tests every day. It is what sets their sales performance apart from their competitors. Amazon, Booking.com, eBay, all rely on the fractional returns they can glean through experiment-led optimisation. Unsurprisingly, this approach has draw-backs.
The focus on present-day analytics can obscure the long-term gains that more substantial imaginative leaps deliver. Marginal gains tend to occur when a website conforms to what is expected of it. This makes it difficult for digital brands to reinvent themselves. Regardless, A/B testing provides a certainty and authority that individual judgement or inspiration can’t match.
So, ten years on from Bowman’s high-profile resignation, what can we say about the concerns that led him to resign. Has experimentation overcome its natural limitations, empowered by big data and Artificial Intelligence? Has computer processing finally succeeded human creativity? And has modern marketing embraced science at the expense of inspiration?
The Era of Scientific Advertising
In answering this question, we should return to the story of Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker. What was it about the world’s first professional copywriter that made him so special?
The answer is contained in a book he published following his eventual (and final) retirement: Scientific Advertising. In this book, Hopkins describes a unique method combining the imagination of the copywriter with the certainty of experiment. Lasker was not employing Hopkins for his artistic flair; what Lasker needed was Hopkins’ method.
To apply scientific advertising one must recognise that ads are salesmen. One must compare them, one by one, on a salesman’s basis, and hold them responsible for cost and result. To advertise blindly teaches one nothing, and it usually leads to the rocks. (2)
Rather than working from guesswork and hunches, Hopkins tested his copy relentlessly. His method was simple: he would attach competing forms of advertising copy to promotional coupons. Then, issuing them in newspapers and magazines, he would see which formulation was returned in greater numbers.
The regime was labour-intensive, and Hopkins himself sometimes questioned the process. To most modern observers, this feverish workshopping looks like the work of an obsessive. To the digital marketers and software engineers whose projects have come to be shaped by data and A/B testing, however, Hopkins’ methods look remarkably familiar.
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…One ad is compared with another, one method with another. Headlines, settings, sizes, arguments and pictures are compared. To reduce the cost of results even one per cent means much in some mail order advertising. (3)
Claude Hopkins was not content with measuring the volume of returned coupons; that would have been an imprecise way to measure the value of different adverts. To compare his advertising materials more exactly, he reduced his figures to Cost-per-Customer or Cost-to-Revenue ratios. Again, this might seem like needless number-crunching to many. To the digital marketer, though, these numbers look identical to the CPC and CPA metrics that govern paid advertising.
Claude Hopkins’ combination of performance metrics, balance sheets and testing allowed him to achieve greater returns than any other copywriter working in the first decade of the 20th century. It was this approach that persuaded Albert Lasker to make the journey between Indianapolis and Chicago. It this method, too, that turned Quaker Oats, Pepsodent and Van Camps into successful brands.
Combining creative brilliance with rigorous testing was the secret to Hopkins’ method. The same principle has allowed brands such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Youtube to sustain their popularity and customer loyalty. As digital marketers struggle to distinguish themselves amongst the dense thickets of rival content, this old formula remains the best approach.
Conclusion
The incorporation of testing methods into modern marketing practices goes beyond a policy of iterative change. When applied properly, a Conversion Rate Optimisation programme can provide new kinds of inspiration. Each time a new design, image or Call To Action outperforms another, it may hint at the logic that informs a far greater innovation.
There is another lesson to be learned from the life and work of Claude Hopkins. Despite how marketing experts and tech advocates insist that modern communications will revolutionise the industry, the truth is not so simple. Science, inspiration and A/B testing are as old as marketing itself.
- Douglas Bowman, “Goodbye Google” (2009). https://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
- Claude Hopkins, My Life in Advertising (New York, 1929).
- Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising (New York, 1923).
