Claude C. Hopkins Quotes

The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.

Good advertising can make people buy your product even if it sucks ... A dollar spent on brainwashing is more cost-effective than a dollar spent on product improvement.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.

It seems to me probable that of all our economic life the element on which we are inclined to place too low an estimate is advertising.

Most national advertising is done without justification. It is merely presumed to pay. A little test might show a way to multiply returns

I have learned that you can't have good advertising without a good client, that you can't keep a good client without good advertising, and no client will ever buy better advertising than he understands or has an appetite for.

American advertisers rely on 'essentially illogical' approaches to determine their advertising budgets.

It's kind of debatable whether or not the advertisement model is effective. Like whether Nielsen works.

I can't say the advertising model is obsolete yet but it doesn't make a lot of sense in the long range.

Money is being wasted on adverts that go right over a consumer's head. They may win awards at Cannes, but they lose at the cash register.

I tend to think that the whole concept of, 'I saw this TV show, and someone was wearing this sweater, and now I'm going to buy that,' it's something that's been talked about for a long time, but I've never really seen it work. When people are watching an entertainment show, they want to be entertained.

Part of how we decide how we allocate our media is we have fairly sophisticated ways of measuring our return on marketing spend, which helps us best analyze the most effective way and medium in which to spend our marketing dollars.

You can feel how much money goes into commercials by how swiftly they act on your mind. And they've got, like, a hypnotic quality to the way they present their products.

Once you become more like Madison Avenue, you become acutely sensitive to what's going to annoy your clients.

Scarcity is a good sales tactic if you are selling something people want.

You don’t have to spend a jillion dollars on advertising to get your word out. What matters is that customers have a good experience with your product at every single point of contact.

Can somebody explain to me why Pepsi and Coke advertise? Are we missing something? Seriously, everyone in this room has drank enough Pepsi and Coke in their lifetime they could piss it for a week.

Repeat your winners. If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency.

Candor compels me to admit that I have no conclusive research to support my view that jingles are less persuasive than the spoken word. You'd run like hell if a salesman came to your door and began singing at you. Why do it in advertising?

Sometimes, the advertising is better than the product. Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. Everyone tries the thing and never buys it again.

Instead of just purchasing an ad campaign, target test and measure. Give an ad a small try. If the response is enough to pay for the ad, make it larger. With a franchise, ask the most successful franchisees what they did. Ask the bottom five guys what they did and avoid it.

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt.

... I have always fallen for ads. The sweetheart of J. Walter Thompson, I have a peasant-like belief in whatever miracle they profess to effect.

You can define advertising as the science of creating and placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets him or her to take some action.