This book presents to you some of the best advertising knowledge. It was assembled from the works of the greatest advertising geniuses of all time.

You can learn the secrets that made their advertising the most successful of all time. And then, you can use them in your advertising, marketing, and promotion to make your own business successful.

A few of these advertising geniuses are still alive today but most are not.

Many of them were at the height of their expertise in the early part of the 20th century, a lot of them before 1930, some between then and 1950 and then it seemed to drop off dramatically. My theory for this is that when radio came along, it took a lot of the good writers out of the print advertising field where they really learned their trade (in mail order and print). Then TV took the rest of them. That’s where the money was.

But as a medium for developing response oriented professionals TV is a poor training ground.

The most prolific field for turning out advertising geniuses is direct response. This is because you have a means of measuring the effectiveness of all your advertising. Indeed, you live and die by the results of your advertising. Therefore, the direct response person MUST track results so he or she knows just how effective any particular ad or medium is.

Today, we also have the Internet and that has provided an even more effective direct response medium than mail order for testing and tracking results. Therefore, I see that there will be a resurgence in advertising geniuses, especially those who can stand on the shoulders (i.e., learn from) the successes of the old time (and present day) advertising geniuses and develop their skills from there.

For the person just starting out or the person who has a small business, the most effective means of testing their advertising is through the Internet, using either direct mail sales copy or other forms of advertising and promotion. But where to you acquire the knowledge to know where to start? That’s easy: study past geniuses.

These are people who came before you and discovered the basic laws of effective promotion. The best way is to model their knowledge, to know what they knew. And you do that by finding a book they wrote because that’s where they deposited their knowledge, the accumulated genius that took them years to develop.

Now, I’m sure there are advertising geniuses in history who didn’t write books. They’re not much use to us now. Their expertise died with them.

But luckily for us, the best of the best were also people who wanted to share their ideas and accumulated knowledge. They went through the trouble to put their expertise down in writing so that, many years later, we can now benefit from their genius.

This book is a collection of the ideas, strategies, and techniques they handed down to us through their books, kind of a Reader’s Digest of classic books on advertising, marketing, copywriting and more.

It’s not meant to be a substitute for reading the original works, most of which you can find on this site. But it will give you a survey and get you started in the right direction…which is turning your ideas and words into profitable copy, advertising, and marketing.