The First Hundred Million is a charming book, almost scary in its faith and innocence, written in 1927 with no idea that the financial end of the era was looming. You won’t skyrocket your own book’s sales using the titling information in this book–in that much, the one-star reviewer and I are in agreement. However: if you read Ogilvie on Advertising, or The Science of Advertising, or anybody on split testing, or if you think split testing was something Google forced us to invent for AdWords–read E. Haldeman Julius.
My stars, he’s verbose! Never use one word where five will do. But he’s linear, and clear, and the words aren’t that out of date even if we don’t write like that anymore. We don’t need to buy a dollar’s worth of nickel books to hide what we wanted to know about sex. We don’t read for quite the same reasons, maybe. Hard to say–I saw some of those titles and wondered if I should write an info product on the topics to sell today. If they needed to know the material in 1927, they sure aren’t getting taught it today.
Seriously–if you study advertising that works, this is a book you should have at hand. I don’t read a lot in history, so I don’t know what it’s like to read the original sources in the original. This particular edition is well produced and easy to read, totally affordable, and entertaining in its own way. I got my money’s worth.
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