My Life in Advertising

Claude Hopkins wrote the foundational text of evidence-based advertising in 1923, but My Life in Advertising — published six years earlier — is his autobiography: the story of how he developed his methods across decades of selling everything from Schlitz beer to Pepsodent toothpaste through a relentless practice of testing, keying returns, and treating advertising as a science rather than an art. Hopkins's career predates modern marketing analytics by a century, yet his frameworks anticipate them with uncomfortable precision.

Mike Woodly narrates Hopkins's direct, confident prose with the appropriate period tone — this is a man who has spent fifty years proving things others believed by instinct, and his voice carries the confidence of accumulated evidence. At just over five hours, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of persuasion, and the audio format makes the anecdote-rich memoir particularly accessible.