This book is not written as a personal history, but as a business story. I have tried to avoid trivialities and 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.
One night in Los Angeles, I told this story to Ben Hampton, writer, publisher, and advertising man. He listened for hours without interruption, because he saw in this career so much of value to beginners. He never rested until he had my promise to set down the story for publication.
He was right. Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others owes a statement to successors. The results of research should be recorded. Every pioneer should blaze his trail. That is all I have tried to do.
When this autobiography was announced as a serial many letters of protest came to me. Some of them came from the heads of big businesses which I had served. Behind them appeared the fear that I would claim excessive credit to the hurt of others’ pride. I rewrote some of the chapters to eliminate every possible cause for such apprehensions.
No; my only claim for credit 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 experience than those who had a lesser chance. Now I want that experience, so far as possible, to help others avoid the same difficult climb. I set down these findings solely for the purpose of aiding others to start far up the heights I scaled. There is nothing to be gained for myself save that satisfaction. Had some one set down a record like this when I began I would have blessed him for it. Then, with the efforts I here describe, I might have attained some peaks in advertising beyond any of us now. May I live to see others do that.
Claude C. Hopkins.
Chapter One
EARLY INFLUENCES
The greatest event in my career occurred a year before I was born. My father selected for me a Scotch mother. She typified in a high degree the thrift and caution, the intelligence, ambition, and energy of her race. Boys, they say, gain most of their qualities from their mothers. Certainly I inherited from mine conspicuous conservatism. The lack of that quality has wrecked more advertising men, more business men, than anything else I know.
That fact will be emphasized again and again in this book. I stress it here in tribute to the source of my prudence. “Safety first” has been my guiding star. A Scotch mother is the greatest asset a boy can have who desires a career in advertising. Then economy and caution are instinctive with him. They are fundamentals. Success, save by accident, is impossible without them. But the lack of these qualities may be partially corrected by studious cultivation.
Most business wrecks which I have encountered are due to overreaching. To reckless speculation on a hidden chance. To that haste which laughs at conservatism. To racing ahead on unblazed trails, in fear that some rival may go farther or get higher.
There are exceptions in business, but not in advertising. All advertising disasters are due to – rashness- needless and inexcusable. I do not mean advertising failures. All of us in this line attempt things which cannot be done. We are dealing with human nature, with wants, prejudices, and idiosyncrasies which we cannot measure up. No amount of experience can guide us correctly in even the majority of cases. That is why incaution is an advertising crime. In every advertising venture we are dealing with a pig in the poke.
But ordinary failures mean little. They are expected. Every advertising venture in its initial stage means simply feeling the public pulse. If people do not respond, the fault often lies with the product, or to circumstances beyond control. The loss is a trifle, if anything, in ventures which are rightly conducted. Hopes and ideas which fail to pan out are mere incidents.
I refer to catastrophes, to the crash of wild speculations. I mean advertising men who pilot some big and costly ship to the rocks. Those men rarely recover. Pilots who prove reckless are forever feared. I have seen scores of promising men in this line wreck themselves with their ships, just because they ventured with all sails spread on some uncharted course. So far as I remember, not one of them ever came back. The Scotch blood in my veins has for thirty-five years kept me from such disasters.
Because of my mother, a dime to me has always looked as big as a dollar. Not my dimes only, but the other fellow’s dimes. I have spent them carefully, both as owner and trustee. I have never gambled in a large way, whether acting for myself or for others. So the failures I have made-and they are many-have never counted strongly against me. I have escaped the distrust engendered by conspicuous disaster. When I lost, I lost little in money and nothing in confidence. When I won, I often gained millions for my client and a wealth of prestige for myself. That I largely owe to my mother.
I owe her vastly more. She taught me industry. I can scarcely remember an hour, night or day, when mother was not at work. She was a college graduate with great intellectual powers. There came a time when, as a widow, she had to support her children by teaching school. Before and after school she did the housework. In the evenings she wrote books-kindergarten books for schools. When vacation came, she tramped from school to school to sell them. She did the work of three or four women. She developed three or four careers.
From my earliest years, under her direction and incentive, I did likewise. I have supported myself since the age of nine. Other boys, when they went to school as I did, counted their school work a day. It was an incident to me. Before school I opened two school-houses, built the fires and dusted the seats. After school I swept those school-houses. Then I distributed the Detroit Evening News to sixty- five homes before supper.
On Saturdays I scrubbed the two school-houses and distributed bills. On Sundays I was a church janitor, which kept me occupied from early morning until ten o’clock at night. In vacations I went to the farm, where the working time was sixteen hours a day.
When the doctor pronounced me too sickly for school I went to the cedar swamp. There work started at 4:30 in the morning. We milked the cows and fed the cattle before breakfast. At 6:30 we drove to the swamp, carrying our lunch with us. All day long we cut poles and hewed ties. After dinner came another milking; then we bedded the cattle for the night. At nine o’clock we crept up a ladder to the attic and our bed. Yet it never occurred to me that I was working hard.
In after years I did the same in business. I had no working hours. When I ceased before midnight, that was a holiday for me. I often left my office at two o’clock in the morning. Sundays were my best working days, because there were no interruptions. For sixteen years after entering business I rarely had an evening or a Sunday not occupied by work.
I am not advising others to follow my example. I would not advise a boy of mine to do so. Life holds so many other things more important than success that work in moderation probably brings more joy. But the man who works twice as long as his fellows is bound to go twice as far, especially in advertising.
One cannot get around that. There is some difference in brains, of course, but it is not so important as the difference in industry. The man who does two or three times the work of another learns two or three times as much. He makes more mistakes and more successes, and he learns from both. If I have gone higher than others in advertising, or done more, the fact is not due to exceptional ability, but to exceptional hours. It means that a man has sacrificed all else in life to excel in this one profession. It means a man to be pitied, rather than envied, perhaps.
Once I said in a speech, I figure that I have spent seventy years in advertising. The time is only thirty-five years by the calendar, but measured by ordinary working hours and amount of work accomplished I have lived two years in one. Frugality and caution kept me from disaster, but industry taught me advertising and made me what I am.
Through father I gained poverty, and that was another blessing. Father was the son of a clergyman. His ancestors far back had been clergymen, bred and schooled in poverty, so this was his natural state.
I owe much to that condition. It took me among the common people, of whom God made so many. I came to know them, their wants and impulses, their struggles and economies, their simplicities. Those common people whom I know so well became my future customers. When I talk to them, in print or in person, they recognize me as one of their kind.
I am sure that I could not impress the rich, for I do not know them. I have never tried to sell what they buy. I am sure I would fail if I tried to advertise the Rolls-Royce, Tiffany & Company or Steinway pianos. I do not know the reactions of the rich. But I do know the common people. I love to talk to laboring-men, to study housewives who must count their pennies, to gain the confidence and learn the ambitions of poor boys and girls. Give me something which they want and I will strike the responsive chord. My words will be simple, my sentences short. Scholars may ridicule my style. The rich and vain may laugh at the factors which I feature. But in millions of humble homes the common people will read and buy. They will feel that the writer knows them. And they, in advertising, form 95 per cent of our customers.
To poverty I owe many experiences which taught me salesmanship. Had it not been for poverty I would never have been a house-to-house canvasser, and there I learned the most I know about human nature as applied to spending money. Canvassing is a wonderful school. One of the greatest advertising men this country has developed always went out to sell in person before he tried to sell in print. I have known him to spend weeks in going from farm to farm to learn the farmers’ viewpoint. I have known him to ring a thousand door-bells to gain the woman’s angle.
To poverty I owe the fact that I never went to college. I spent those four years in the school of experience instead of a school of theory. I know nothing of value which an advertising man can be taught in college. I know of many things taught there which he will need to unlearn before he can steer any practical course. Then higher education appears to me a handicap to a man whose lifetime work consists in appealing to common people.
Of course we had no advertising courses in my school days, no courses in salesmanship or journalism, I am sure it would be better if we did not have them now. I have read some of those courses. They were so misleading, so impractical, that they exasperated me. Once a man brought me from a great technical school their course in advertising, and asked me how to improve it. When I read it I said: “Burn it. You have no right to occupy a young man’s most impressive years, most precious years, with rot like that. If he spends four years to learn such theories, he will spend a dozen years to unlearn them. Then he will be so far behind in the race that he will never attempt to catch up.”
As I said, I was exasperated. I left a bad impression. But tell me how a college professor, who has lived his life in an educational cloister, can be fitted to teach advertising or practical business. Those things belong to the school of real business. They are learned nowhere else. I have talked with hundreds of men on this subject. I have watched the vagaries of men who, for lack of education, place a halo on men who have it. I have gone to colleges, entered their classes, listened to their lectures. I went with respect, for I belong to a college family. I was born on a college campus. Father and mother were both college graduates, my grandfather was one of the founders of a college. My sister and my daughter have college educations.
I am weighing my words. I have watched countless college men in business. In an advertising agency of which I was head, we employed college men, even as office boys. Many a client of mine has adopted the same policy-to employ none but college men. The whole idea was to employ men with training which the employers lacked, and of which they keenly felt the lack. But I cannot remember one of those men who ever gained a prominent place. The men who spent those college years in practical business had an overwhelming advantage. As far as advertising is concerned, one can learn more in one week’s talk with farm folks than by a year in any classroom I know.
To Will Carleton I owe the influence which directed my course from the ministry. I was destined to be a clergyman. I came from a clerical ancestry. My given names were selected from the Who is Who of clergymen. There was not the slightest question in the minds of my family that my career would lie in the pulpit.
But they overdid the training. My grandfather was a Hardshell Baptist, my mother a Scotch Presbyterian. Together they made religion oppressive. I attended five services on Sunday. I listened Sunday evening to dreary sermons when they had to pinch me to keep me awake. Sundays were desolate days. I was not allowed to walk. I could read nothing but the Bible and the Concordance. I spent the days in counting the words and letters in the Bible to confirm the Concordance. I read in addition Pilgrims’ Progress, and that was certainly not a guide to any road a boy would care to follow.
Seemingly every joy in life was a sin. I was taught that people who danced, played cards, or attended the theater belonged to the devil’s ranks. And they who read any books which did not come from the Sunday school were headed for a hot hereafter.
Will Carleton was a classmate of my father’s at college. He wrote “Over the Hills to the Poor- house,” and other famous ballads. The state of Michigan has recently honored him by setting aside his birthday, October 13, for annual observance in the schools. He became the idol of my youth.
When I was a boy of nine or ten Will Carleton was on the lecture platform. When he came to our city he stopped at our home, and he found there the ultra-religious atmosphere not pleasant for a boy. After one of his visits he wrote a ballad based on that experience. It was published in his City Ballads, and the title was, “There Wasn’t Any Room for His Heart.” It recited the tale a young man told the sheriff on his way to prison. The tale of a Scotch Presbyterian home where religion was fanaticism. The boy, through this repression, was driven into crime. Will Carleton in that ballad made me the victim of that religious tragedy, and sent me a copy of the book.
That ballad had a greater influence on my career than all my family teachings. I admired Will Carleton. I wanted to be when I grew up a famous man like him. His attitude on my home life agreed with mine, of course. And when such a man agreed with me he gave my opinions weight. Ever after that Will Carleton became my guiding star. His attitude on religious fanaticism showed me for the first time that there was another side.
I went on studying for the ministry. I was a preacher at seventeen. I preached in Chicago at eighteen. But the course of thought which Will Carleton started eventually made a religious career impossible for me.
Another event had a great effect. My sister and I had been ill. Mother had nursed us and cared for us. During our convalescence she read to us Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A little later I learned that the play was coming to town, so I made arrangements to distribute the bills and earn some tickets for it. After much persuasion mother agreed to let us see the play.
The time was a week ahead, and the days passed with leaden steps. On the morning of the great day I arose at four o’clock. The day seemed endless. At seven o’clock in the evening my sister and I were unable to wait longer, so we induced our mother to start with us for the town hall.
On the way we met the Presbyterian minister. He was an old bachelor who had forgotten his youth. Children instinctively shrank away from him, so I sensed in his approach a calamity.
He accosted us and said: “Well, sister, I see you are out for a stroll. I love to see a mother and her children in such perfect harmony.”
Mother replied: “Yes, brother, we are out for a stroll. But for more than that. I feel I should tell you something. These children have been ill. During their recovery I read them Uncle Tom’s Cabin. They became intensely interested. Tonight the play is coming to town and this boy has earned the tickets. I have agreed to take the children to the play. It cannot be worse than the book, and the book has certainly been a great factor for good.
The bachelor clergyman replied: “I see your logic, sister, and I sympathize with your desire. The book did prove itself a factor of tremendous good. But remember this: Those children will sometime go out from your care. They will sec the lights of the devil’s playhouses urging them to enter. What will they say when those temptations come? Will they say that their mother took them to their first play, so they should not hesitate?”
Mother replied: ‘You are right. I must not set this bad example.” And she turned and took us home. In one moment I lost all respect for what mother typified, and I never regained that respect.
Another man exerted a remarkable influence on my impressive years. He was a railroad section foreman, working for $1.60 per day. He bossed several men whose wages were $1.15 per day.
Up to the age of six or seven I was surrounded by college students at play. I knew nothing of the serious side of student life, but I saw all the college pranks. Thus I gained a rather firm idea that all life was a playground.
This section foreman reversed that idea. He impressed me with the difference between him and his helpers. The helpers worked from necessity. They did as little as possible. They counted the hours to quitting time, then on Saturday nights they would go to the city and spend all they had earned in the week.
The foreman worked with enthusiasm. He said: “Boys, let us lay so many ties today. Let us get this stretch in fine shape.” The men would go at it stoically, and work as though work was a bore. But the foreman made the work a game.
That man built his home in the evenings, after ten-hour days on the railroad. He cultivated a garden around it. Then he married the prettiest girl in the section, and lived a life of bliss. Eventually he was called to some higher post, but not until I learned great lessons from him.
“Look at those boys play ball,” he said. “That’s what I call hard work. Here I am shingling a roof. I am racing with time. I know what surface I must cover before sunset to fulfill my stint. That’s my idea of fun.”
“Look at those fellows whittling, discussing railroads, talking politics. The most that any of them know about a railroad is how to drive a spike. They will always do that and no more. Note what I have done while they loafed there this evening-built most of the porch on my home. Soon I will be sitting there in comfort, making love to a pretty wife. They will always be sitting on those soap boxes around the grocery stove. Which is work and which play?”
“If a thing is useful they call it work, if useless they call it play. One is as hard as the other. One can be just as much a game as the other. In both there is rivalry. There’s a struggle to excel the rest. All the difference I see lies in attitude of mind.”
I never forgot those talks. That man was to me what James Lucey was to Calvin Coolidge. I can say to him now, as Coolidge said, “Were it not for you I should not be here.”
In later years I became a director of the Volunteers of America and made a study of life’s derelicts. I studied them in the soup kitchens, in prisons and on parole. Their great trouble was not laziness, but too much love of play. Or, rather, a wrong idea of play. Most of them had in their youth worked every waking hour. But some worked at ball-throwing while others hoed the corn. Some pocketed balls while others pocketed orders. Some of their home runs were recorded in chalk while others’ were carved in stone. All the difference lay in a different idea of fun.
I came to love work as other men love golf. I love it still. Many a time I beg off from a bridge game, a dinner, or a dance to spend the evening in my office. I steal away from week-end parties at my country home to enjoy a few hours at my typewriter.
So the love of work can be cultivated, just like the love of play. The terms are interchangeable. What others call work I call play, and vice versa. We do best what we like best. If that is chasing a polo ball, one will probably excel in that. If it means checkmating competitors, or getting a home run in something worth while, he will excel in that. So it means a great deal when a young man can come to regard his life work as the most fascinating game that he knows. And it should be. The applause of athletics dies in a moment. The applause of success gives one cheer to the grave.
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