A Review of My Life in Advertising

Tags: books

Pepsodent Ad

My Life in Advertising is the autobiography of Claude Hopkins. It’s out of copyright, so you can also get a legitimate copy from The Internet Archive. Everyone reading this post is in sales and marketing, and so everyone reading this post can gain something from this freely available book.

Three themes repeat throughout the book:

  1. Know your customer, show them value, get the sale.
  2. Trace your advertising efforts through the sale.
  3. Work is play, if framed correctly.

I hosted a book discussion on The Power of Habit. If you’ve read that book, Claude’s work on Pepsodent will sound familiar. Charles Duhigg wrote about Claude’s work on Pepsodent that helped usher in an age of tooth brushing in America.

Internet marketers pat themselves on the back for A/B testing. Claude did that in print, and with real, physical product on the line. Everything old is new again.