FROM THE MARKETING DESK
5 Insights from Claude Hopkins: Godfather of Scientific Advertising
“People don’t buy from clowns.” — Claude C. Hopkins
In marketing departments around the world today the name of the game is analytics. We measure everything, especially in the realm of cyberspace. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” we’re fond of saying.
So we have quasi-infinite data points and reams of data for nearly everything. How many people landed on our home page? How many bounced and how quickly? How many are first time visitors? Where did they come from? What kind of operating system do they have? What part of the site did they go to next? How many pages did they view and for how many seconds? And that’s only the beginning.
Although this whole data analysis game seems new and ultra mod, it’s really not new. It’s simply the endpoint in a methodology that goes back a full century to the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins.
Over the course of my career in advertising, I’ve made no bones about my most significant influence: David Ogilvy. I’ve read all his books and used his Ogilvy On Advertising the way preachers use the Bible. If I strayed from the book, I’d better have a good reason.
