Any modern marketer will tell you that data and research are a must for making informed decisions and creating ads that will resonate with their target audience and perform better. It’s even safe to say that modern marketing has now reached the status of a science. 

Still, some marketers argue that art, with its creative and artistic elements, is the most important factor in creating effective advertising campaigns. An ad's emotional impact drives consumer behavior, as creative elements such as imagery, messaging, and tone can make an ad more memorable and, thus, effective.

This ongoing debate of art vs. science started back in 1923 when Claude Hopkins, an advertising man and a copywriter, introduced his book “Scientific Advertising” where he offered scientific advertising strategies and principles that are still relevant and used today. 

As a design agency for marketing, we at TodayMade believe that a combination of both art and science works best for creating effective ad campaigns. We create emotionally impactful and data-driven designs that have already helped our clients achieve good results. And we think that some of our insights about marketing as a science would be interesting for you to learn. Let’s get into it! 

Scientific advertising, its benefits, and key components

Scientific advertising is a term Claude Hopkins used in his book to describe approaches and technologies that lead to great sales. The following quote best summarizes Hopkins's principle, 

“A salesman's mistake may cost little. An advertising mistake may cost a thousand times as much.” Copywriting is truly one of the most powerful skills an online professional can learn, and you don’t have to be an amazing writer to write amazing copy. What you need are science, structure, and story.” 

The scientific advertising approach provides many advantages, such as data-driven decision-making, more efficient resource allocation, ongoing campaign optimization, and measurable results. Other advantages include:

• Improved targeting: using data helps reach the people most likely to be interested in your product or service.
• Increased ROI: testing and optimizing your ads helps improve your performance.
• Better understanding of your audience: conducting research and analyzing data can help you create ads that resonate with your target audience.
• More efficient use of resources: using data can help make more informed choices about where to allocate your resources.

Deep knowledge is a core component of scientific advertising as marketers spend hours of painstaking efforts to write one good ad. They use these scientific approaches:

• Conducting market research, customer surveys, and data analysis to understand the target audience, their needs, preferences, and behaviors.
• Developing a hypothesis about what will work best for advertising campaigns based on the research and data analysis.
• Testinga hypothesis, creating different versions of ads, and trying them against each other. A/B testing, multivariate testing, and the like can be used.
• Doing data analysis to determine which version of the ad performed best and why. For example, Google Analytics is a great tool marketers and scientific advertisers use today to measure and report on user activity to better understand their customers.

• Optimizing ads for better performance. This can include changing messaging, imagery, targeting, and other elements of ads.
• Continuous improvement over time. This can help stay ahead of the competition and drive better results for your advertising campaigns in the future.

Okay, now it seems like we’re done with theory and can move on to some of the principles Claude Hopkins popularized.

7 scientific advertising principles to apply

Claude Hopkins introduced timeless secrets that continue to guide the best minds in marketing even in the 21st century. So, let’s look at the most important takeaways Scientific Advertising can offer marketers:

1. Test the ads: Measure the sales from each advertising campaign to find out what resonates with customers more. Intuition is not enough today. Instead, using thousands of repeated tests can bring the best results. Hopkins treated ads as individual experiments and admitted that a marketer would be wrong 9 times out of 10. So, start every new campaign with a series of small tests.

2. Invest 80% of your efforts in headlines. There is a big difference between a bad headline and a good headline. Headlines are what help your prospects decide whether to read your ad or skip it. If the ad doesn’t get the right audience’s attention, then all other words don’t matter. Hopkins noticed that a headline change alone multiplied an ad's returns by 5-10 times. The famous headline “Food shot from guns!” is still regarded as Hopkins’ best heading example.

3. Avoid vague claims like "best quality" or "lowest prices." Instead, use specific and measurable claims that are backed up by data or research. Specifics are more convincing and help build trust and credibility with the audience. For example, Hopkins changed the phrase “Fastest shave” into “78-second shave,” which allowed it to attract many new customers.
4. Encourage readers to act now and not later. Focus on present-day inconveniences and how the product, program, or service eases the trouble. You should identify pain points when writing for others and follow a marketing maxim: "Painkiller, not vitamin."
5. Focus on benefits, not just features. When creating ads, focus on the benefits of your product or service, not just the features. Also, you should visualize your individual buyers and see a product from their perspective.
6. Tell a story. There is a common myth in marketing that ads should be short. Hopkins offers another principle: “Tell your full story and sell more”. People like stories, and modern marketers know that storytelling always gives a great advantage. So, whether you’re writing articles, social media posts, or ads, try to thread the story into your writing.
7. Use pictures, but wisely. Hopkins devoted a separate chapter to the topic of art in advertising. The author claims that pictures in advertising are very expensive not only because of the cost of good artwork alone but in the cost of space. Hopkins emphasized that anything expensive must be effective, or else, it involves much waste. And if you use pictures, they must help sell the product more than anything else can do. The author agrees that many pictures can tell a story better than text can. He found that in the advertising of Puffed Grains, the pictures of the grains proved to be most effective. The pictures awoke customers' curiosity. No figures, numbers, or data could compare in results with these grains pictures.

As creative marketing designers, we know that well-chosen illustrations are a versatile branding tool. They can help communicate hard-to-understand concepts and introduce complex products. They allow businesses to capture and communicate emotions, becoming a great sales tool.

We’ve covered key tips from Hopkin’s scientific advertising book. This book contains 21 chapters with amazing marketing lessons worth reading. You can look through all the topics with a modern commentary provided by Strategicmarketingpartner. 

The scientific advertising approach is particularly important for tech companies as it aligns with their data-centric, innovation-focused concept. It enables them to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving industry. For example, Amazon implemented data-driven strategies that allowed the company to reshape the industry and pave the way for a new era of customer-centric retail experiences.

How Amazon utilized Big Data to drive sales

Since its launch in 1994, Amazon has grown into a tech giant, posting more than $514 billion in revenues in 2022. The primary reason why the company has remained the e-commerce leader for years is because it implements a data-driven approach to advertising and predictive analytics for targeted marketing. 

Amazon collects consumer information and analyzes data to personalize product recommendations, refine search results, and optimize its advertising campaigns. Overall, the company gets information from three main sources:

1. The data customers provide when they use Amazon’s services.
2. The data it finds automatically. This can be information about your phone type, location, and so on.
3. Information from third parties, such as purchase info, credit checks, returns, and so on.

Amazon’s privacy notice informs that the company may automatically collect customers’ IP addresses, login credentials, computer locations, and errors when logging in. Also, it can collect users’ app preferences, cookie details, and URLs that users click, including how they hover over a product, when they scroll or click.

All in all, Amazon’s commitment to data-driven decision-making goes beyond day-to-day operations. The company gathers customer feedback, analyzes reviews, and tracks behavior to continuously improve and innovate its offerings. Such an approach worked great for Amazon. The company constantly identifies areas for enhancement and tailors its products and services to meet customer expectations and demands more effectively. 89% of Amazon customers remain loyal to the platform. The company achieved the CSAT (customer satisfaction score) of 84 out of 100 ASCI points. In Q3 of 2023, the Amazon Online Store represented over $57 billion of the total $143.1 billion in revenue generated.

Striking a balance

No matter how good the scientific approach is, it still can’t fully replace humans’ creativity, intuition, and emotions. The artistic aspect involves understanding human behavior and crafting visually appealing campaigns. 

On the other hand, the scientific aspect entails gathering and analyzing data for optimal results. The Amazon case proves that using the power of big data analytics and technologies helps not only enhance marketing and advertising efforts but also create personalized shopping experiences, increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

We at TodayMade believe that striking a balance between art and science is crucial because creating outstanding ads without comprehending your target audience's behavior and tailoring the visuals to match it effectively is impossible. If you want to learn more about data and analytical tools used in marketing or need a consultation on how to implement scientific advertising methods for your projects, the TodayMade team is here to help you. Drop us a line here!