We think this campaign will be great.” You’ve heard it before. Promises based on gut feelings. Instincts. Years of experience. And when the campaign fails? “Not sure.” “A lot of factors involved.” “No explanation.” “It worked before.” Comical.
“The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood.”
It’s been almost a hundred years since Claude Hopkins authored that statement in his book Scientific Advertising(published in 1923). Mr. Hopkins realized that a scientific approach to the practice of marketing made sense to generate the optimal results for both an agency and company client. The advertising industry was still largely a mass communication mentality back in 1920, although some of the more progressive industries (read cigarettes) were exploring segmentation as a means of differentiation out of necessity. (It’s Toasted!)
Today, data for insight is everywhere. In just the last few years, Google searches have doubled from 2,000,000 to 4,000,000 every minute. Facebook leaped from sharing 684,478 pieces of content to 2,460,000 per minute and Tweets jumped from 100,000 a year to 277,000. Data is everywhere and consumers are demanding that companies clue into using that data to market to them in a more personalized and relevant way.
We’ve arrived at a time when a data-driven approach to marketing should be mandatory. 94% of CMOs in a recent IBM study said they intend to use Advanced (predictive) analytics within the next 3-5 years. That underscores the awareness and importance of using data to inform advertising and marketing decisions today.
Back when Claude was writing Scientific Advertising, the best you could do was apply scientific rigor and analysis to direct mail response data (read coupons).
What would Claude think of the data we have at our fingertips today? CEO’s are expecting marketers to use metrics to ensure fact-based decision-making to justify budgets and their jobs. In similar fashion, smart marketers are using agencies that leverage data for insight and creative inspiration. That’s what the practice ofAdvertising Science™ is all about. Practiced properly, you no longer have to make decisions based on fuzzy feelings —“we THINK we know what will work”. Instead, you make your marketing decisions based on what you KNOW will work. It will be a scientific certainty.
Here’s the good news. We have developed a revolutionary data management platform that takes care of all that guesswork and those fuzzy feelings. It’s called AdScience™. Finally, marketers can know with scientific certainty who their customers are and what they will respond to. More importantly, with the AdScience platform, now marketers can use that information to identify and acquire all new customers that look just like their most valuable customers.
What is AdScience™?
Advertising Science™ is the “intellectual and technological activity that organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the efficacy of advertising.”
AdScience is Advertising Science in action. The AdScience platform is the powerful data management system that profiles current customer data to more profitably mine new customers for our clients.
With AdScience, we’ve taken the mystery out of advertising.
Learn more about the AdScience™ platform here.
You might also be interested in this article, “The Science Behind Creative Advertising.”
