Books on Selling and Advertising
Build a practical sales education from measurable advertising to offers, direct response, and human persuasion.
For founders who need to explain an offer and find customers.
How to use this guide
Move from testing an advert to writing headlines, stating a promise, running direct marketing and understanding persuasion.
The selection, reading order and reasons below are the library’s editorial guidance. Each founder connection has its own source.
- Scientific Advertising
Start with the principle that selling can be tested, measured, and improved.
David Ogilvy — Reading recommendation
In Ogilvy on Advertising, Ogilvy credits Scientific Advertising with changing the course of his life and urges repeated reading.
Source for David Ogilvy - Tested Advertising Methods
Apply that principle to headlines and messages that earn attention and action.
David Ogilvy — Foreword author and recommendation
Ogilvy’s own reading list identifies his foreword, and his headline-writing discussion recommends Caples’s book. These passages refer to an earlier edition.
Source for David Ogilvy - Reality in Advertising
Learn to express one clear product promise that competitors cannot easily claim.
David Ogilvy — Reading selection
Ogilvy includes Reeves’s Reality in Advertising, identifying the 1961 Knopf edition, in the reading list of Ogilvy on Advertising.
Source for David Ogilvy - Commonsense Direct Marketing
Connect the offer, copy, media and planning to a customer response that you can measure.
David Ogilvy — Author-reproduced recommendation of an earlier edition
Bird’s site reproduces Ogilvy’s recommendation to read the work again. It concerns an earlier edition, not the expanded 2007 Direct and Digital Marketing edition, which appeared after Ogilvy’s death.
Source for David Ogilvy - Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Finish with the recurring social cues that shape why people say yes.
Charlie Munger — Recommendation
In The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Munger says Influence helped him understand thinking errors. He sent copies to his children and gave Cialdini a Class A Berkshire share in thanks.
Source for Charlie Munger