Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life. He held that nobody with a college education should be allowed to write copy for the mass market. I know what he meant. He was an uncompromising practitioner of the experimental method, forever testing new ideas in search of better results – even if, as Politz has pointed out, he did not always indicate ‘the boundaries between direct findings from experimentation and conclusions arrived at by general observation and reasoning.’ A few of his conclusions have been disproved by later research. We now know, for example, that he was wrong when he said, ‘In every ad consider only new customers. People using your product are not going to read your ads.’ The fact is that users of a product read its advertisements more than non-users.