Online Digital Marketing Today
Sep 15, 2026 · 23 min · 10 segments
If you're still treating advertising like some kind of creative art project, you're literally throwing money out the window. Here's what's crazy: Over 100 years ago, Claude C. Hopkins figured out the…
What if I told you that the single most expensive, like, potentially ruinous mistake a company can make is trying to teach you a new habit?
Right, which sounds totally counterintuitive.
It really does.
Yeah.
I mean, we often assume that marketing is all about creating entirely new desires or, you know, radically shifting our behavior.
Yeah, that's the common myth.
But when you actually look at the data, uh, attempting to change human nature rather than just serving it is basically a financial black hole.
So welcome to today's deep dive.
Glad to be here.
Today, we are looking at a foundational text from the 1920s that practically invented the concept of performance marketing, which is Codsey Hopkins' Scientific Advertising.
Yeah, and it is a text that fundamentally changed the trajectory of the whole industry.
Because before this, marketing was just guessing.
Pretty much, yeah.
[laughs]
Before this era, advertising was largely considered this, uh, unquantifiable art form.
Brands would spend absolute fortunes on beautiful illustrations and poetic copy, toss it out into the world, and just sort of hope sales went up.
Just cross their fingers.
[laughs]
Exactly.
But Hopkins approached it with the mindset of a laboratory scientist.
He argued that human psychology doesn't change, and therefore, the principles of persuasion can be measured, tested, and, you know, codified into fixed laws.
Right, and for you listening, if you're familiar with modern digital marketing, so A/B testing, cost per acquisition, conversion funnels, this deep dive is gonna show you exactly where all of that DNA comes from.
It really is the blueprint.
The mission today is to unpack how this text stripped away the guesswork and whimsy of marketing and replaced it with rigorous data-driven psychology based on traced returns.
Okay, let's unpack this.
What if I told you that the single most expensive, like, potentially ruinous mistake a company can make is trying to teach you a new habit?
Right, which sounds totally counterintuitive.
It really does.
Yeah.
I mean, we often assume that marketing is all about creating entirely new desires or, you know, radically shifting our behavior.
Yeah, that's the common myth.
But when you actually look at the data, uh, attempting to change human nature rather than just serving it is basically a financial black hole.
So welcome to today's deep dive.
Glad to be here.
Today, we are looking at a foundational text from the 1920s that practically invented the concept of performance marketing, which is Codsey Hopkins' Scientific Advertising.
Yeah, and it is a text that fundamentally changed the trajectory of the whole industry.
Because before this, marketing was just guessing.
Pretty much, yeah.
[laughs]
Before this era, advertising was largely considered this, uh, unquantifiable art form.
Brands would spend absolute fortunes on beautiful illustrations and poetic copy, toss it out into the world, and just sort of hope sales went up.
Just cross their fingers.
[laughs]
Exactly.
But Hopkins approached it with the mindset of a laboratory scientist.
He argued that human psychology doesn't change, and therefore, the principles of persuasion can be measured, tested, and, you know, codified into fixed laws.
Right, and for you listening, if you're familiar with modern digital marketing, so A/B testing, cost per acquisition, conversion funnels, this deep dive is gonna show you exactly where all of that DNA comes from.
It really is the blueprint.
The mission today is to unpack how this text stripped away the guesswork and whimsy of marketing and replaced it with rigorous data-driven psychology based on traced returns.
Okay, let's unpack this.
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