#430 How to Write Ads That Sell

**David Senra** (0:00)
This book is not written as a personal history, but as a business story. I tried to confine myself to matters of instructive interest. The chief object behind every episode is to offer helpful suggestions to those who will follow me, and to save them some of the midnight groping which I did. Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others, owes a statement to his successors.
The results of research should be recorded. Every pioneer should blaze his trail. That is all that I've tried to do.
My only claim is that I have probably worked twice as long as anybody else in this field. I have lived for many years in a vortex of advertising. Naturally, I learned more from that experience than those who had a lesser chance. I want that experience to help others avoid the same difficult climb. I set down these findings solely for that purpose of aiding others to start far up the heights that I scaled. Had someone set down a record like this when I began, I would have blessed him for it. So that is Claude Hopkins right in the preface of his autobiography, which is called My Life In Advertising. When you buy this book, it actually comes with a second book that he wrote, a book that he wrote maybe four decades before he wrote his autobiography, which is called Scientific Advertising. So I actually, I reread these books. I read both these books for the first time, I don't know, like probably like five years ago. And I found them because one of my personal heroes is this guy named David Ogilvy.
And David Ogilvy said essentially like he built the foundation for his giant advertising agency that he founded just on the work alone of Claude Hopkins. And I originally set out to write. So here's a crazy story for you. This will explain everything that I wanna talk to you about today. So there is a book written by Claude Hopkins, which is called Scientific Advertising, okay? It is sold like 8 million, 10 million copies. It's probably the most important book ever written on advertising. If you factor in who read the book and then what it influenced him to build after that.
The book was so valuable that when Claude first wrote it, he showed it to the founder of the firm that he is working for, this guy named Albert Lasker. Now, this is really important to follow because Albert Lasker is the person that made the most money in advertising ever.
Albert Lasker read the book, told Claude Hopkins, Absolutely not, you are not publishing this book, this is giving away all of our secrets, you have to wait until I'm done making all this money. Albert Lasker put the book into a safe for 20 years. When Albert Lasker was done, quit his advertising agency, I think he wound up giving it to some of his employees and left, then Claude Hopkins was allowed to publish the book called Scientific Advertising, which is then over the last 100 years, because I think the book came out like 1920, maybe 1930, something like that.
He sold almost 10 million copies. So then this week, I was like, oh, I've been wanting to focus on headlines, and essentially, how do you distill down the most important idea into Maxim, which you know I'm obsessed with, and then how do I apply that to headlines? Because for my other show, the new show I started last year, where I'm actually having conversations with some of the greatest living founders, a lot of the, there's like so much of the value in the conversations is down into these like small clips of three, four, six minutes, and personally, I was reading Scientific Advertising to get better at writing a way to distill a main message from like a three-minute clip into like a one sentence that would essentially act as a headline for a clip, right? And so I was like, oh, I'm going to read this whole book. I finished reading Scientific Advertising, and I was like, god damn, this is good. And then it made me go back and start, I didn't, I wasn't planning on doing this episode the way I'm doing it right now. And then I go back and reread his autobiography, which I wasn't planning to talk to you about today. I was just going to talk to you about Scientific Advertising. Damn it, there's too much good stuff in here. So then what I did is went back and compiled all my notes and all my highlights into this one book, which I just transferred. I spent, you know, the last, I don't know, like 10 hours or something. It took a long time to do this.