My Life in Advertising

Hopkins opens his life story with a joke that is also a thesis: "The greatest event in my career occurred a year before I was born." His father, he explains, selected for him a Scotch mother.

From her, he says, came thrift, caution, ambition and an appetite for work that bordered on the absurd. From his father, a clergyman's son in a long line of poor clergymen, came something he counts as just as lucky: poverty.

Hold on to that pairing, because the rest of the book keeps drawing on it. Out of those two inheritances came caution, industry and the common touch, and nearly every campaign in the later chapters, from carpet sweepers to toothpaste, leans on all three at once.

Hopkins draws a line most people blur: the difference between an ordinary failure and a catastrophe.

Ordinary failures are part of the trade. Everyone in advertising attempts things that cannot be done, because the job deals with wants, prejudices and quirks that nobody can measure. Every venture, he says, is a pig in a poke. A new campaign is simply a way of feeling the public pulse, and if people do not respond, the loss in a properly run venture is a trifle.

A catastrophe is something else: the man who steers a big, costly ship onto the rocks because he sailed an uncharted course with every sail spread. Hopkins says he watched scores of promising men do exactly that. As far as he could remember, not one of them ever came back.

It is easy to read Hopkins's motto, "safety first," as the creed of a timid man. He meant nearly the opposite. He cheerfully admits his failures were many. He just never let one of them be large.

That changes what failing costs. "When I lost, I lost little in money and nothing in confidence. When I won, I often gained millions for my client." A small loss leaves you free to try again next week. A wreck ends the game.

So his caution was never a brake on experiment. It is what makes constant experiment affordable. The reckless man gets one big throw and lives or dies by it. The careful man gets hundreds of small throws, and learns something from every one of them.

A company lets its advertising man stake the entire year's budget on one untested national campaign, and it flops badly. How would Hopkins classify what happened?

• Bad luck, since the fault most likely lay with the product itself
• A catastrophe, because the risk was rash and never needed taking✓Correct answer
• An ordinary failure, since no one can predict what the public wants
• A useful lesson, because big losses teach more than small ones do

Hopkins expects failures, but only small ones from ventures that feel the public pulse first. Betting everything on an uncharted course is the rashness he calls needless and inexcusable, and a pilot who wrecks a ship that way is feared ever after.

Caution had a second side that mattered even more to his career. His mother made a dime look as big as a dollar to him, and not only his own dimes but the other fellow's.

An advertising man spends other people's money. Hopkins says he never gambled in a large way, for himself or for a client, and handled a client's budget the way a trustee handles an estate.

The reward was trust. A pilot who once proves reckless is feared forever, and a feared pilot is not handed another ship. By keeping his losses small, Hopkins kept the confidence of the people who hired him, and that confidence was what brought him the next account, and the one after it.

The second inheritance was work. His mother, left a widow, taught school, did the housework before and after classes, wrote kindergarten books in the evenings, and in vacations walked from school to school to sell them. Hopkins says she did the work of three or four women.

He copied her. He supported himself from the age of nine. Before school he opened two schoolhouses, built the fires and dusted the seats; after school he swept them out and delivered the Detroit Evening News to sixty-five homes. On Sundays he was a church janitor until ten at night.

When a doctor declared him too sickly for school, he was sent to a cedar swamp, where the day began at 4:30 with milking and went on to hewing railroad ties. It never occurred to him, he says, that he was working hard.