Scientific Advertising

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1. robomartinSep 2023
   > What should I read, watch or listen to in order to catch up on today's approach to selling, do you have some recommendations?

   It really depends on where you are in this journey.

     Seth Godin
       Permission marketing
       Tribes: We need you to lead us
       All marketers are liars
       This is marketing
       Etc.
     
     Ries & Trout
       Positioning: The battle for your mind
       The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
       Etc.
     
     Scientific Advertising - Claude Hopkins
   
     https://www.foundingsales.com/
     
     The Little Red Book of Selling - Gitomer
   

   Learning to use online channels, in my opinion, requires a lot of work. Companies like Google have useful material. Frankly, this subject is wide and deep. I got into it starting about twenty years ago.

   Perhaps others can suggest books or courses/videos on best practices for online marketing and optimization that are more up to date.

   I'll warn you that at some point in my journey I hated the fact that I had more business books by my bed than engineering books. It was frustrating until I reached what I call "cruise altitude" and had enough capabilities and understanding to do well.

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2. lansteinMar 2023
   Advice to Founders and CEOs

   - Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)

   Finance

   - Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)

   Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)

   - The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)

   Legal

   - Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)

   Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)

   - Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore) - Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove) - Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh) - The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen) - Good to Great (Jim Collins) - Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin) - Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman) - Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)

   Pricing

   - Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan) - Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)

   Startup Phase

   - The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) - The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) - Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

   Management/Leadership

   - The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker) - Managing Humans (Michael Lopp) - The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp) - High Output Management (Andy Grove) - Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker) - Essentials: Management (First Round Capital) - The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo) - The Powell Principles (Oren Harari) - Radical Candor (Kim Scott) - Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda) - Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation) - Principles (Ray Dalio)

   COO/Succession Planning

   - Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)

   People Performance/HR/Culture

   - Powerful (Patty McCord) - No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer) - Netflix culture deck - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) - Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock) - It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried) - The Culture Map (Erin Meyer) - The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle) - Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz) - The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman) - Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

   Purpose, Passion, and Self

   - Start with Why (Simon Sinek) - What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz) - Drive (Daniel Pink) - Mindset (Carol Dweck) - Grit (Angela Duckworth) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)

   Fundraising/VC

   - Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) - Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson) - Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks) - The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani) - Done Deals (Udayan Gupta) - The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby) - VC (Tom Nicholas)

   Board

   - Boardroom Excellence (Paul Brountas) - Startups Boards (Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani)

   M&A

   - Winning (Jack Welch) - M&A chapter - Connecting the Dots (John Chambers) - M&A chapter

   Marketing

   - Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery) - Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout) - Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins) - Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares) - Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler) - Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy) - Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)

   Psychology

   - Influence (Robert Cialdini)

   Negotiation

   First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order

   - Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke) - Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury) - Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss) - The Bald Truth (David Falk)

   Self

   - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)

   Design and UX

   - Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)

   AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)

   - Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone](https://www....

   Growth (Data Science, etc.)

   - Hacking Growth (Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown)

   Graph Theory

   Product

   - Inspired (Marty Cagan) - Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)

   Customer Loyalty/Customer Success

   - Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - Setting the Table (Danny Meyer)

   Finding a Startup Job

   - Entering StartupLand (Jeffrey Bussgang)

   CIO as ICP

   - The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller) - Be the Business (Martha Heller)

   Stories

   - Made in America (Sam Walton) - Shoe Dog (Phil Knight) - The Everything Store (Brad Stone) - Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank) - Hard Drive (James Wallace) - Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) - Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull) - The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger) - Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher) - The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner) - Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik) - Idea Man (Paul Allen) - Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)

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3. nickelcitymarioNov 2022
   "Scientific Advertising" by Claude C. Hopkins. This book is turning 100 years old next year, but what I loved about it is that because it predates the Internet (and even TV and the mass proliferation of radio), it doesn't get bogged down in specifics.

   But, the principles laid out in this book almost entirely apply to online marketing.

   So when I read this book, everything clicked. The closest I can compare it to is when you first learn multiple programming languages and develop an abstract understanding of the concepts. Once you have that abstraction, you can generally pick up any language pretty quickly. It's mostly just semantics.

   Similar to this book's impact on my understanding of digital marketing. With the basic concepts of scientific advertising under my belt, I can pretty confidently hop into any platform and learn the syntax, as it's the same ideas, simply reimplemented with better tech.

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4. OtternonsenzDec 2021
   The gold standard I held myself to while in the copywriting business was:

   -Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (c. 1923)

   It is more a book about A/B testing from the literal grandfather of the practice and while some of the examples may be outdated, it is not hard to see parallels with whatever you might be writing for. I have given my copy away to a younger copywriter, but you can find it cheap on Thriftbooks or elsewhere.

   -Made To Stick by Chip & Dan Heath (c. 2007)

   Really great book to train the eye on what can make copy “sticky”, with stories to show the concepts they are teaching with portions at the end of each chapter to apply the characteristics of stickiness to your own work. Truly it’s a great book if you write a lot of fluff in your copy and need to get more succinct.

   - The Gary V Content Model ( Link: garyvaynerchuk.com/uploads/GV-Content-Model-1.pdf)

   Not so much on copywriting, but on how to build content (writing in this context) around “pillars” that hold up spun off portions or your larger main idea. So more like being able to strategize your writing in such a way that if you do need to write stuff that can be portable and used many different places it is cohesive with your main idea. I see this slide deck as not a “do it this exact way” but a nice playbook to reference or expand upon for your own uses.

   With any of these books, and whatever else you do come across to deepen your learning, I’d tell you to keep your own notebook or journal of copywriting and gather all the info you can into a way that makes sense for you. I still have mine that I reference often, and because I use the Cornell Method of note taking, I fill in the left side of my journals with my own thoughts or examples, or even expand on the teachings I copied into the notebook. Hopefully these recommendations and this paragraph are helpful!

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5. nickelcitymarioJul 2021
   Pedantic correction: "Ogilvy".

   While the only metric that matters is sales (I fully agree), you need other metrics to understand how those sales happened. This is the dangerous thing.

   I've worked at companies where people were evaluated based on very specific metrics, like web traffic or social media engagement. The problem with that is you end up focusing on improving those numbers rather than improving sales.

   But if you only focus on sales, you can't tell which activities made a difference (or in which direction). You need other data to understand what's happening.

   A better book than Ogilvy on Advertising, in this regards, is Claude C. Hopkins' Scientific Advertising. It lays out all the principles for testing ads, back when we didn't have any concept of analytics. The basic method was: Try different things in different markets to see what works best. Keep doing it indefinitely, so that your ads only ever get better.

   There's no reason the same approach can't be taken with public relations. If you're working for a national brand, try assigning some PR folks to exclusively work the media in one given region. Then see what the difference is.

   (Obviously, you have to do a lot of work to "control the variables", but any data scientist -- or any scientist at all, actually -- should be able to figure that out in their sleep.)

   It's not rocket science. These methods have been around for a very long time.

   Honestly, I think we've just gotten lazy. Setting up market tests is a lot of work, whereas creating an A/B test in AdWords is easy. But there's no such thing as an unmeasurable publicity tactic (whether it's advertising or public relations). You just gotta be willing to do the work.

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6. mrmrcolemanNov 2019
   I'm not sure if businesses spend roughly the same on advertising. I've experienced wildly different %'s of total spend depending on various factors.

   Regarding the efficacy of online advertising, some businesses do notice but at the same time there's a larger question which is the trade-off between what online ads can achieve for different products at different stages.

   Imagine a scale from "sitting in front of someone and explaining the value prop" to "an adwords ad."

   If you're trying to remind someone about a brand they already know about, or attract them to a value prop that is easily explained online ads are great. If you have an unknown or hard to explain value prop you'd be better off starting elsewhere.

   I agree that we need more research. Also, some suggested reading for anyone who's interested:

   Traction: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22091581-traction (Good comparison of different marketing channels)

   Scientific Advertising: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2621927-scientific-adver... (1923 book on measuring marketing)

   Positioning: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/760025.Positioning (First book to properly capture the ideas behind "brand marketing")

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