 Scientific Advertising. Written by Claude C. Hopkins and narrated by Paul Jones. Scientific Advertising. Chapter 1. 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 method of procedures have been proved and established. We know what is most effective and we act on basic law. Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become under able direction. One of the most safe business ventures. Certainly no other enterprise with comparable possibilities need involve so little risk. Therefore, this book deals not with theories and opinions, but with well proven principles and facts. It's written as a textbook for students and a safe guide for advertisers. Every statement has been weighed. The book is confined to established fundamentals. If we enter any realms of uncertainty, we shall carefully denote them. The present status of advertising is due to many reasons. Much national advertising has long been handled by large organizations known as advertising agencies. Some of these agencies and their hundreds of campaigns have tested and compared the thousands of plans and ideas. The results have been watched and recorded so no lessons have been lost. Such agencies employ a high grade of talent. None but able and experienced men or women can meet the requirements in national advertising. Working in cooperation, learning from each other and from each new undertaking, some of these people develop into masters. Individuals may come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become part of the organization's equipment and a guide to all who follow. Thus, in the course of decades, such agencies become storehouses of advertising experiences, proven principles, and methods. The larger agencies also come into intimate contact with experts in every department of business. Their clients are usually dominating concerns, so they see the results of countless methods and policies. They become a clearinghouse for everything pertaining to merchandising. Nearly every selling question which arises in business is accurately answered by many experiences. Under these conditions where they long exist, advertising and merchandising become exact sciences. Every course is charted. The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, and cheapest course to any destination. 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. Mail order advertising is traced down to the fraction of a penny. The cost per reply and cost per dollar of sale show up with utter exactness. One ad compared to another, one method with another. Headlines, settings, sizes, arguments, and pictures are compared. To reduce the cost of results, even one percent means much in some mail order advertising. So no guesswork is permitted. One must know what is best. Thus mail order advertising first established many of our basic laws. In lines where direct returns are impossible, we compare one town with another. Scores of methods may be compared in this way measured by cost of sales. But the most common way is by use of the coupon. We offer a sample, a book, a free package, or something to induce direct replies. Thus we learn the amount of action with each ad in genders, or cost per dollar of sale. These coupon plans are dealt with further in the chapter on test campaigns. Here we explain only how we employ them to discover advertising principles. In a large agency coupon returns are watched and recorded on hundreds of different lines. In a single line they're sometimes recorded on thousands of separate ads. Thus we test everything pertaining to advertising. We answer nearly every possible question by a multitude in its traced returns. Some things we learn in this way apply only to particular lines, but even those supply basic principles for analogous undertakings. Others apply to all lines. They become fundamentals for advertising in general. They are universally applied. No wise advertiser will ever depart from those unvarying laws. We propose in this book to deal with those fundamentals, those universal principles. To teach only established techniques. There is that technique in advertising as in all art, science, and mechanics. And it is, as in all lines, a basic essential. The lack of those fundamentals have been the main trouble with advertising of the past.