Direct Response
Advertising you can count. The whole of this model rests on one thing: measuring the reply. Its prehistory is the later nineteenth century, when patent medicine and mail-order advertisements began counting the letters that came back. The coupons Asa Candler of Coca-Cola handed out in 1887 were not discounts but free tickets for a taste — and the name simply took the French word for «to cut». What turned that form into an instrument for measuring advertising was Claude Hopkins. Same object, different purpose. In the early 1890s, at a carpet-sweeper company, he mailed five thousand letters and took a thousand orders — a fifth. In 1907, at a brewery, he wrote in the advertisement that the bottles were washed with steam. Every brewer in the industry did it; the one that said it first won. Then in 1923 Scientific Advertising put the idea into a single book: advertising is salesmanship, its purpose is to sell, and the result has to be countable. David Ogilvy, the god of brand advertising, said he read this textbook of measurement seven times. Next came John Caples. In 1926, in his first year in the business, he wrote the line: «They laughed when I sat down at the piano — but when I started to play!» In Tested Advertising Methods (1932) he reports seeing one mail-order advertisement sell nineteen and a half times as much as another for the same product, in the same space, with the same picture — only the appeal changed. Print two headlines and compare them: the ancestor of what we now call an A/B test. The phrase «direct marketing» itself came from Lester Wunderman, first used in a talk in 1961 and defined at MIT in 1967. On television, the United States dropped its limits on programme-length advertising in 1984 and the infomercial arrived. And in the 2000s came «pay only when it is clicked» — a hundred-year-old principle finally rendered in a form you can count to the last unit. That last line is this map's own reading.
The myth, corrected
«Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half» — John Wanamaker
No record of Wanamaker saying it has been found anywhere. A close phrasing was already in a trade paper in 1890, and the earliest document attributing it to him is from 1919, quoted by a minister in a lecture. In Britain the same thought is handed down as Lord Leverhulme's. The best part is that a biographer found the maxim among Wanamaker's papers, typed — with no source and no signature, and he habitually wrote by hand. It was most likely a copy of someone else's line. The thing this map keeps finding — a name attached after the fact — turns out to happen to famous quotations too.