Persuasive Advertising: Evidence-Based Principles

"Professor Armstrong's groundbreaking book is a must-read for anyone in the advertising business. All effective advertising starts with understanding consumers and what motivates them. This book provides a powerful and comprehensive compilation of those consumer truths. Buy this book. It's marketing gold."uLinda Kaplan Thaler, CEO & Chief Creative Officer of The Kaplan Thaler Group, bestselling co-author of The Power of Nice and The Power of Small

"Scott Armstrong has shown that persuasive advertising is not a mystifying, amorphous art to be admired, but a clear, hard science to be understood. Anyone interested in how advertising works would be a fool not to learn what this book teaches."uRobert B. Cialdini, author of Influence: Science and Practice

"A unique combination of quantitative research, anecdotal evidence and common sense. David Ogilvy would have enthusiastically added this book to his recommended list for anyone in the advertising business."uKenneth Roman, former Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, author of The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modem Advertising and of How to Advertise

"This fascinating collection of smart rules and when to use them is truly persuasive!"uGerd Gigerenzer, Director at Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

"Scott Armstrong has provided all of us with a rich handbook to guide our efforts to use persuasive advertising efficiently and responsibly."uPhilip Kotler, S.C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

"The volume of evidence sifted to produce this book is mind boggling. It is a resource that every advertiser can dip into regularly to maximize effectiveness and help avoid traps for the unwary."uDr Max Sutherland, author of Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer

"We now have the facts. There is no other book that comes close to Persuasive Advertising. Written in a convincing and accessible style, the book is also engaging and entertaining."uRik Pieters, Professor of Marketing, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

"Clear writing that is provocative! Amstrong's dislike for platitudes is apparent. For certain, Persuasive Advertising is one of the top three books on advertising...ever."uArch G.Woodside, Professor of Marketing, Boston College

"This book is a remarkable exemplar of turning evidence into action."uJeffrey Pfeffer, Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-author of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management

"Many people claim to have advertising principles u but this is the first time they have been systematically developed from experimental evidence. If you want more effective advertising, read this book."uMalcolm Wright, Head of School of Marketing, University of South Australia

"Persuasive Advertising promises to be not only an essential part of the toolkit of advertising professionals but also a standard reference work for scholars. Simply put, this is a landmark achievement."uDaniel J. O'Keefe, Owen L Coon Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University

Persuasive Advertising is a guide for all who commission, design, or evaluate advertisements.

This book translates knowledge about persuasion into evidence-based principles. Useful knowledge about persuasion has been obtained over the last 100 years from the experience of advertising experts and from empirical studies in advertising and other fields including psychology, consumer behavior, law, mass communication, politics, and propaganda.

The principles in Persuasive Advertising provide understandable and easy-to-access guidance for all types of advertising. Including still media such as print and Internet, and motion media such as TV, streaming video, Internet, and radio. They also apply to other types of persuasive communications such as management reports, speeches, and press releases.

Wharton School Professor J. Scott Armstrong spent over 16 years on this book. In recent years, he was assisted by Gerry Lukeman, Chairman Emeritus of Ipsos-ASI and Sandeep Patnaik, Research Director at Gallup and Robinson. Altogether, more than 80 people contributed to Persuasive Advertising by obtaining relevant studies, analyzing data, editing and reviewing, and surveying researchers to ensure that the book correctly summarizes their findings.

Persuasive Advertising summarizes findings from about 3,000 empirical studies and 50 books. It also presents new findings from previously unpublished studies.

Along with the AdPrin Audit software on AdPrin.com, Persuasive Advertising enables advertisers as well as agencies to quickly and inexpensively identify ways to improve ads u or to determine which of a set of ads will be most effective. For example, it typically requires about an hour for an experienced user to obtain a persuasiveness index for a print ad along with a list of ways to improve the ad.

By using these principles, advertisers can improve their creativity and effectiveness.

With collaboration from...

Gerry Lukeman, Chairman Emeritus of Ipsos ASI, began working at what was then known as Audience Studies Inc. ("ASI") in 1964. Gerry was hired to build an advertising dimension, and Ipsos ASI is now one of the world's largest advertising research companies. He has been listed among Advertising Age's "100 leaders of the Research Industry," and is Chairman of the Ogilvy Awards Advisory Committee. In 2009, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Advertising Research Foundation.

And from Dr. Sandeep Patnaik, the Research Director at Gallup and Robinson. Sandeep has been involved with the Persuasive Advertising book since 1998. Since 2006 he has led research efforts to test the advertising principles on the nearly five hundred print ads featured in five editions of Which Ad Pulled Best. His current research interests include understanding emotional and cognitive reactions to advertisements. Sandeep also teaches Marketing in the MBA program of the Graduate School of Management, University of Maryland.

J. Scott Armstron (Ph.D. from MIT in 1968) is Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching advertising since 1968. He has been a Visiting Professor in Thailand, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, UK, France, Australia, South Africa, Spain, and Argentina. In 1994, for example, he was the Hakuhodo Advertising's Visiting Professor in Tokyo. He is the founder and director of advertisingprinciples.com, which received the 2004 MERLOT Award for the "Best Internet Site in Business Education." A 1989 study ranked Armstrong among the top 15 marketing professors in the U.S., and in 2000 he received the Society for Marketing Advances Distinguished Scholar Award. He is the most frequently cited professor in the history of the Wharton's School's marketing department. His resume is available at jscottarmstrong.com.