Chapter 1 Setting the scene – how marketing used to work

Jeffrey Cruikshank is generally credited with having invented modern marketing in the early 1900s. Over the next couple of decades this was refined by some of the best-known names in advertising, many of whom live on as the names of large agencies such as Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy and J. Walter Thompson. They all discovered that showing a message to people when they weren’t expecting it was a surprisingly effective tool in changing people’s behaviour to get them to buy a product.

This technique became known as ‘interruption marketing’, because you quite literally interrupted people – naturally. Ever since then marketing has largely been based ...

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