Advertise This

In Takimag, the great statistician and social scientist Steve Sailer notices something about advertising we've suspected for a few years now. Sailer tells us how he worked in marketing research in the 1980's. He says:

...in the second half of the 1980s, clients started to complain that very few of our tests showed that increasing TV advertising by 50 or 100 percent would move the needle on sales at all.

Sailer tells us that:

This is not to say that good advertising couldn’t help a new brand, but there tended to be diminishing returns once an identity was established.

We really agree with the above.

Sailer goes on to say how he encouraged companies to cut advertising to see what happened. The advertisers didn't want to, of course.

We've cut our advertising budget drastically over the years. Basically, we think we've established our brand, and our fans are going to buy our books regardless. Advertising does not seem very effective these days at bringing in new customers.

Our most successful book had the most advertising. We assumed  this was both correlation and causation. The book was Israel Strikes.  But what if the subject was just so interesting to readers and so timely that most of the advertising wasn't really necessary? Frankly, we wonder. Back then we kept meticulous daily data on sales and ad debuts, both print and digital. When new ads went up sales spiked.

But still.

Going back now, we ran plenty of print and digital ads for A Line Through the Desert. They didn't work and throughout the winter of 2009-2010 we wondered if we had made a bad career move.

Our next book was To Defend the Earth. Here we started digitally and moved on into print. Much to our surprise we moved product everyday. It was wonderful.

Then came Israel Strikes. When this book came out in early 2013 we bought digital ads and print ads in military history magazines. It occurred to us that they have military history magazines in Britain. So we went and bought a lot of ads over there. Voila! Where before we had few fans in the UK now we have thousands. In fact, per-capita we're more popular in the UK than in the USA. Thanks Limeys!

But here again we seem to have hit our ceiling and new ads just don't seem to be making much of an impression. To restate, saturation doesn't help. We've also tried running ads a few years after the last ad, thinking this would grab reader attention and gain new fans. Sorry, nope. There seems to be an absolute limit to an ads effectiveness regardless of time.

Our own rule now is one and done. One ad for a new book in a particular platform and then get out.

Actually, with World War 1990: ANZACs, we'll be running a little advertising experiment, so we'll see.