Feeling the pulse — Kelford Labs Daily
By expecting failure.
“But ordinary failures mean little. They are expected. Every advertising venture in its initial stage means simply feeling the public pulse. ...The loss is a trifle, if anything, in ventures which are rightly conducted. Hopes and ideas which fail to pan out are mere accidents.”
— Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising
Claude C. Hopkins was probably the most successful advertising copywriter of all time. Possibly for all time.
In today’s money, his salary at the agency Lord & Thomas around the turn of the 20th century was over four million dollars.
Why? Was he some kind of genius? Some one-of-kind artist?
Well, yes and no. Because as he once put it, “Genius is the art of taking pains.”
His advertisements worked because he tested them. He “felt his way” toward success by preserving his clients’ budgets so he could keep trying until it worked.
He pioneered the school of “scientific advertising,” which in many ways simply means measuring your results and doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. He’d insist that no advertising campaign or tactic be launched until it was tested.
Which requires the resources to try multiple things, just in case something doesn’t work.
It’s nice to think we could get it right on the first try, and sometimes we might.
But we still need to, as Hopkins says, expect failure. We need to treat our first attempts as feeling the public pulse, and learning what they’ll respond to.
So that as we keep trying, we keep getting better.
Because we kept going.
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