Although nearly forty years separates Reality in Advertising, which was first printed in 1961, from Scientific Advertising, published in 1923, both share the basic premise of identifying, quantifying and applying proven rules and principles.  

Claude Hopkins and Rosser Reeves were both copywriters (though Reeves eventually became an agency chairman). And although Hopkins worked exclusively in print and direct mail and Reeves was a through-and-through television writer, both have a strong, implicit belief that copy is the central function of advertising.

That focus on copy, and on observation and data gathering (essentially the scientific method applied to advertising) gives their books a unity far more important than their relatively insignificant differences in language, the societal norms they assume and some aspects of the marketing and communications environments in which their theories and methods operate.

Reeves begins his book with a pair of quotes:

"After all, advertisements are purely functional things, and therefore the criterion is their success as advertisements and not as works of art. Commercial considerations are the judges, not a panel of any number of distinguished gentlemen." H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh

"Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said 'How well he spoke' – but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said 'Let us march'?" Adlai Stevenson

They sum up his approach very succinctly. Reeves was all about efficacy, not art. So what did he find – and, perhaps, prove – to be efficacious?

First, and with uncharacteristic modesty, he claimed that advertising and sales are not directly linked. There is a chain of events through which advertising impacts sales, but Reeves contention was that there are too many external factors that can effect sales to attribute shifts directly to advertising. One of the examples he gives is a company which released defective products and saw sales plummet despite no change in advertising. 

In Reeves's words: "Recently a group of marketing men, almost idly, at a luncheon table, listed thirty-seven different factors, any or all of which could cause the total sales of a brand to move up or down. Advertising was only one of these."

So what can we be sure of?

Usage pull. It's a comparison of purchase of a product by people who are and are not aware of its advertising. If 5% of people who are not aware of a product's advertising buy the product, and 10% of people who are aware of the product's advertising buy the product, the usage pull – the extra purchase attributable to advertising – is 5%. Reeves uses the percentage of the total population surveyed pulled to buy the product as the usage pull number. Some might say the advertising doubled sales.

One important factor is that usage pull can be a negative number. Some advertising can actually decrease sales. (A fact also noted by in a subsequent advertising classic, Confessions of an Advertising Man, by David Ogilvy, one of the other marketing men at that luncheon table with Reeves.)

Penetration. Simply the number of people who remember an advertiser's message. As with usage pull, there is tremendous disparity in penetration. Reeves notes a range between 1% and 78% for major national package goods campaigns at the time. He notes that two campaigns for competing products with identical budgets registered 1.8% and 44% penetration. A twenty-fold increase in effectiveness based on the message and execution alone.

Volatility. Advertisers can't buy recall. At most they can rent it. Reeves relates a much simplified version of an experiment by Ted Bates' excellent research department. They did an advertising recall study and retained the contact information for all members of the panel. Six months later they re-polled the same panel. The recall number was the same, but the people who did and did not recall the advertising had changed! Although the campaign and media budget had been maintained exactly as they were, some panel members who had previously been aware of  the advertising had forgotten it, and some who had previously not been aware of it now were aware.

It means that to keep share of mind (awareness) advertisers must keep advertising.

To quote Reeves: "Like the mercury in a barometer, penetration is supported by pressure – the pressure of the same story and of advertising dollars. When the pressure falls, or the story changes, the penetration barometer falls."

Consistency. "Too-frequent change of your advertising campaign destroys penetration." is the way Reeves put it.

To our knowledge, no one has ever run test in which a product's advertising has remained consistent in one market and changed repeatedly in another and then compared awareness, preference, purchase intent and actual sales. Reeves relies on examples of relative penetration of  advertising for companies which frequently change campaigns and that of competitors which stick with one campaign over decades.

The comparisons are very persuasive. (We certainly believe the principle. See Think Your Campaign Is Wearing Out? in our article archive.) But the rock-solid data that gives absolute credibility to usage pull, penetration and volatility just isn't available in this case.

Room in the box. Reeves reported the concept two decades before Jack Trout and Al Ries popularized it in Positioning, a book which is itself something of a later-day advertising classic.

Essentially "room in the box" means that there is a finite amount of information about any given product category that people are willing to store in memory. The amount varies by person and by product category. Adolescent males are willing to store a lot of data about video games, but not much about cooking utensils. Pre-pubescent girls store tons of data on boy bands, but not much on wrinkle creams.

The important part of the "room in the box" idea is that it's finite. Information about one brand in a category forces out information about a competitor. Ted Bates research found that over time people recalled different campaigns in various product categories, but more or less the same amount of total information per category. There were simply limits to their interest – and to their memory capabilities.

So an extremely strong message for one brand can take up so much room in its box that it actually forces competitors' messages out.

Multiplier effect. The Bates Copy Laboratory found that execution could affect recall of an identical message by a factor of fifteen or more. That's 1500%! And this is with top pros writing and producing both pieces. The data does not relate to the effectiveness of the message, only to the commercials' effectiveness at delivering that message.    

Reach rules! Bates media researchers found that penetration tracks reach (albeit several points behind) all the way up to about 70%. Last year What Sticks (a new advertising classic) made a similar observation based on recent data. So total audience delivery is paramount, and frequency secondary. (In fairness, the advertisers Reeves wrote about and those Rex Biggs and Greg Stuart studied 45 years later were all large enough to have respectable frequency numbers even at high reach.)

There's no data to support the best-known concepts: U.S.P. and vampire video!

Rosser Reeves is most famous for his concept of the Unique Selling Proposition. While he puts forth his theory forcefully – and credibly – in Reality in Advertising, he doesn't back it with credible data. It remains a very convincing theory, not an incontrovertible reality.

Same with vampire video. Although we've seen subsequent data on the deleterious effect of distracting viewers (or readers or surfers) from the main point of a commercial, ad  or web site with irrelevant visuals, none are presented in Reality in Advertising. So, once again, a very convincing theory, but not a proven fact until several years after the book was written.

Despite the lack of data to support those two theories, Reality in Advertising has essential information for any marketing communications professional. Most of that information is also available in more recent books. And some of Reeves's nuggets have to extracted from steaming mounds of bombast and shameless sales hype. But just as we can better understand contemporary English language and literature by reading Shakespeare, so we can form a richer understanding of the craft of persuasion by learning from its formative giants. 

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