The detective novelist Dorothy L Sayers had a day job as an advertising copywriter. In 1937, she wrote an essay, titled ‘The Psychology of Advertising’, in which she explained what an advertiser needed to do, in order to be successful. “In a few hundred words, or perhaps in as few as fifty, he must arrest attention, hold interest, persuade,” she explained. “Every word must pull its weight and the smallest error is an expensive disaster.”

Sayers’ insight into the complex art of persuasive communication still stands – though today, the advertising industry is well on its way to shrugging off the ‘Mad Men’ reputation it had in Sayers’ time.

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