The History of the AIDA Model

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

Picture the problem as Lewis described it in 1908. A magazine reader meets advertising, all competing for the same wandering eye. Salesmen faced the same contest face to face.

The AIDA model took shape in American advertising and salesmanship writing between about 1898 and 1911, and nobody can name its single inventor with confidence. For most of the twentieth century the credit went to advertising man E. St. Elmo Lewis, on the word of psychologist Edward K. Strong, who put the date at 1898 in a 1925 book. A recent historian's review of the early literature finds that account unsupported. It points instead to Arthur F. Sheldon and Frank H. Dukesmith. The one-line throughline: a salesman's checklist for the buyer's mind turned into a slogan, then into a theory of how advertising works, then back into a writer's checklist.

Lewis's magazine reader may face one to two hundred pages of advertising. Nobody had agreed on what a message or a sales talk had to do, in what order, to turn a stranger into a customer. This article follows how an answer was assembled, who wrote which part, and what the long record teaches. For the wider story, see the history of sales, and for the working method itself, see the AIDA model explainer.

Timeline at a Glance

Before the Formula (4th century BCE-1897)

Orators and psychologists describe the parts, nobody orders them

Start with a hard line between precursor and concept. Persuasion was studied for more than two thousand years before anyone wrote AIDA. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle sorted the persuasion of the spoken word into three kinds, drawn from the speaker's character, from the state of mind of the audience, and from the argument itself. That is a theory of what persuades, with no step-by-step sequence in it, and nobody has shown a line of descent from it to the salesmen's slogan. It belongs here as the oldest map of the territory.

The nearer ancestor is psychology. In 1890 William James opened his chapter on attention with the line "Every one knows what attention is." He described it as the mind taking possession of one object out of many. Advertising writers of the 1890s read James, and Lewis's 1908 book would cite "Prof. James" in the very chapters on interest and on moving people to act, as its chapter summaries show.

Sales books of the time reached for rhetoric too. According to the historian Akinori Iwamoto, Frederick Goddard's 1889 selling manual said the salesman speaks to explain, convince and persuade. Iwamoto adds that Goddard gave no integrated sequence, and that a 1911 author later overrated that passage as the origin of AIDA. So even the early near-misses need care.

What was missing was a short, teachable order. Selling was still learned on the road, in the style of the traveling salesmen, or through company primers such as the NCR sales training program of the 1880s and 1890s. Print advertising was growing, but nobody had asked in print what a message must do in what order.

For teams today: the parts of a persuasive message were known long before the formula. The formula's contribution was ordering them, which is also what a good brief does.

The Philadelphia Slogan (1897-1908)

An advertising man writes attention first, and credit follows him

The traditional hero is Elias St. Elmo Lewis, who was writing on printing and publicity by 1897 and who served as advertising manager for both the National Cash Register Company and the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, according to the Advertising Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame also credits him as co-founder and first president of the Association of National Advertisers. This era overlaps the next one: Lewis and the Sheldon School were working at the same time on the same question.

The credit rests on Strong. In his 1925 book Strong wrote that in 1898 Lewis used the slogan "Attract attention, maintain interest, create desire" in an advertising course in Philadelphia. Strong added that Lewis writes that he took the idea from reading William James, and that the fourth term, "get action," came later. The same account appeared in his February 1925 article "Theories of Selling" in the Journal of Applied Psychology, per the reference list in Iwamoto's paper.

Now compare that with Lewis's own printed record. Iwamoto's survey of Lewis's writings from 1897 to 1910 finds no printed version of the 1898 slogan. His 1899 rule of advertising, in the same survey, asked the advertisement to catch the eye, inform, and make a customer, and his February 1903 Book-Keeper article said an advertisement should attract, then interest, then convince. The 1908 book, Financial Advertising, published by Levey Bros. of Indianapolis when Lewis was advertising manager at Burroughs, makes the pattern concrete. Its chapter headings treat attention, interest and conviction as the "three essentials in successful advertising" in separate chapters: attracting the attention, awakening the interest, and creating the conviction. The word that is missing is desire.

Lewis was also still a working advertiser and not a theorist. Iwamoto notes that in 1902 he was the instructor for the Peirce School's advertising course and told an interviewer that no textbooks were required. One scrap of evidence does tie him to the slogan as a known phrase. In a 1910 report of a Rochester talk, Iwamoto says, Lewis was quoted remembering the old advertising men's tolerance for a writer who said all advertising must attract attention, maintain interest, arouse desire and get action. That shows the phrase circulated by 1910. It does not show he coined it.

For teams today: Lewis's chapters carry the durable idea, which is that attention is the entry fee and not the goal. Judge a headline by what it does for the second sentence.

The Sheldon School Years (1902-1920)

Salesmanship gets four mental states in print

The turning point is a classroom by mail. Arthur Frederick Sheldon founded the Sheldon School in 1902, and a later business-history article dates the school to the period 1902-39. According to Iwamoto, who cites Sheldon's own 1912 claim, the school had 10,000 students across the United States and abroad within three years, and its textbooks taught a "mental law of sale" from the start. Treat the enrollment figure as the school's claim about itself.

Sheldon's early lessons used a four-step sequence, but his fourth word was "resolve to buy." Iwamoto's survey of the 1903-1905 lesson texts quotes Sheldon's phrase for the stages: attention, interest, desire and resolve. By 1910, Iwamoto says, Sheldon wrote of four mental states that must occur in every customer's mind in every sale: first attention, second interest, third desire, fourth action.

Sheldon was not alone. Frank H. Dukesmith edited the monthly Salesmanship, and Iwamoto counts 11 short articles by him on the sequence in 1903 and 1904, with his own fourth word: conviction, replacing "closing the sale". Dukesmith's later partnership with a coauthor carried a table that matched four steps of a sale to attention, interest, desire and conviction. In December 1904 the same magazine ran Seth Brown's piece listing the forces that command attention, interest, desire and then produce action, the earliest ordered A-I-D-A list Iwamoto found.

The fifth step came next. Sheldon's The Art of Selling, published in 1911 by the Sheldon University Press of Libertyville, Illinois, tells students to note the successive steps in a sale: favorable attention, interest, desire, action and permanent satisfaction, each depending on the one before. Sources differ on exactly when he added the fifth. Strong placed the addition at about 1907 and says it was missing from Sheldon's 1905 and 1910 writings, but Iwamoto cites a 1910 listing with six states that includes satisfaction. By 1911 it was certainly in print.

Meanwhile the formula spread and mutated, as Strong recorded. A 1910 Printers' Ink writer gave "attract attention, develop interest, produce conviction, induce action", and other authors of the 1910s and early 1920s swapped desire for conviction, confidence or judgment. The International Correspondence Schools handbook of 1909, per Iwamoto, had five steps of its own. The formula was becoming common property, which is how the question of who owned it got blurred. It also spread through the channels where it could be tested at scale, such as mail order, as in catalog selling, and personal selling lessons such as those that fed Dale Carnegie's classes.

For teams today: the useful part of the Sheldon version is the last step. Selling to satisfaction means the sequence does not end at the order, which is a lesson current teams relearn when churn hits.

The Strong Verdict (1921-1950s)

A Stanford psychologist names two founders and doubts the model

By the 1920s a psychologist stepped in to take stock. In 1921 psychologist Harry Dexter Kitson published The Mind of the Buyer with Macmillan, and organized it around six stages: attention, interest, desire, confidence, decision and action, and satisfaction. His preface says the mind must pass through certain stages on the way to buying.

Then came Strong, a professor at Stanford's graduate business school. His 1925 The Psychology of Selling and Advertising (McGraw-Hill) sorted the field into three theories of selling: the mental-states formula, a behavioristic "situation-response" view, and a view of the buyer as a being with wants. He credited Lewis and Sheldon, and he judged the formula's reach to be very large: his own estimate was that about nine in ten people in advertising and selling were consciously or unconsciously influenced by it. That is an estimate, not a measurement.

Strong was also the first serious critic. He argued that the seller's real aim should be to establish ideas and feelings about what the buyer can get from the goods, not mental states. And he wrote that no salesman could ever identify his prospect's stage and say to himself that the man was in the third stage of attention. He saw the formula's influence already declining in the books of the early 1920s. His book also left a trap for later historians: the credit to Lewis carried no citation, and Iwamoto reports that Strong repeated it unchanged in later works, including a 1938 revision.

For teams today: Strong's complaint is still the right test. A checklist helps a writer, but you cannot observe a buyer's stage from the outside, so confirm it with what the buyer does.

The Hierarchy Debate (1961-1999)

Researchers turn a salesman's slogan into a theory of effects

AIDA left the sales manual and entered the journals. In October 1961 Robert Lavidge and Gary Steiner published a short article in the Journal of Marketing that asked what advertising is supposed to do and what its functions are, and what that implies for measuring effectiveness. Their model, and similar 1961 and 1978 ones, followed the same logic as AIDA: a buyer moves from thinking through feeling to doing. Iwamoto describes these as hierarchy models of the cognitive-affective-conative ordering, and it is the same order that Barry and Howard later wrote up as stages in a hierarchy of effects.

The textbooks cemented the Lewis story. Iwamoto reports that the leading marketing textbook has carried a citation for Strong's work since 1972, and that the 1987 and 1990 review articles by Barry, and Barry and Howard, each repeated the attribution to Lewis. In 1990 the pair also did something more important. Their review in the International Journal of Advertising traces the literature from the turn of the century and critiques the evidence for hierarchy models, as published in volume 9, issue 2.

The decisive doubt came in 1999. Demetrios Vakratsas and Tim Ambler reviewed more than 250 journal articles and books for the Journal of Marketing, and concluded that there is little support for any hierarchy in the sense of temporal sequence. They suggested instead studying advertising's effects in a space with affect, cognition and experience as dimensions. In plain terms, buyers do not reliably march through fixed stages.

That left AIDA in an odd spot: widely quoted, widely taught, and without strong evidence for its core assumption that the stages occur in order. For the later descendants of that logic in sales, see the history of the sales funnel and the stage-by-stage sales funnel breakdown.

For teams today: treat any stage model as a hypothesis about a funnel and test it against your own data. Do not assume buyers pass through every stage, or in one order.

The Credit Reckoning (2000s-present)

A historian reopens the file and the credit moves

The last turn is about history, not about buyers. In a Japanese-language article published in 2024, Akinori Iwamoto of Kansai University argued that the belief in Lewis's invention in 1898 rests on inaccurate and insufficient historical research. His English-language paper makes the case in detail. It finds no evidence that Lewis produced the AIDA prototype in or around 1898, names Sheldon and Dukesmith as the decisive figures, and says Sheldon's fourth word, "action," was the missing part. It also finds that Lewis's printed statements through 1908 contained attention, interest and conviction, but not desire, and leaves open that Lewis might have taught the slogan aloud.

The argument is one scholar's, built on early texts that any reader can now check on the Internet Archive. Several of those texts are cited above and agree with the outline. The honest reading for a team is that AIDA has several authors across several years, with Lewis's work on attention and interest, Dukesmith's and Sheldon's on desire and the sale, and Sheldon's fifth step on satisfaction.

Meanwhile the formula stays in daily use. Iwamoto calls AIDA "probably the most widely quoted model" in marketing, advertising and selling, citing an earlier author. Marketing teams use it to outline emails and landing pages, and sales teams use it to shape openers and pitches. For practical use, see the AIDA model article, and for the sales-method line that took a more observational route, the history of SPIN Selling. The modern rival that attacks the premise that buyers wait to be led through steps is covered in the history of the Challenger Sale.

For teams today: when you inherit a method with a famous founder, check the founder story. Credits in business lore are often assigned late by one influential book.

Key People

Key Facts

• Strong's 1925 book dates Lewis's "Attract attention, maintain interest, create desire" slogan to 1898 and says Sheldon added permanent satisfaction.
• Lewis's 1908 Financial Advertising built its core chapters on attention, interest and conviction, not desire.
• Sheldon's 1911 The Art of Selling listed five steps: favorable attention, interest, desire, action and permanent satisfaction.
• Kitson's 1921 The Mind of the Buyer used six stages, adding confidence and satisfaction.
• A 1999 review of more than 250 sources found little support for any temporal hierarchy of advertising effects.
• A 2024 historical article argues the Lewis-1898 account rests on weak evidence.

The Pattern Behind the History

Our synthesis, not published research. Call it the Slogan-to-Credit Cycle, four steps that recur when a practical formula spreads:

• Converge. Several writers reach the same order of steps at about the same time, here from advertising and from salesmanship.
• Compress. A short slogan is easier to teach than the nuance behind it, so the stages lose their qualifiers.
• Credit. A later authority names one founder, and repetition makes the credit look like settled fact.
• Check. Researchers test the model against evidence, and the formula survives as a writer's checklist while its claims about the buyer's mind weaken.

AIDA has gone through all four, and the credit step is the one being reopened now.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Use the sequence to edit, not to predict. Attention, interest, desire and action are a good order for a message, and a poor map of any one buyer's mind.
• Keep the last step. Sheldon's satisfaction and Kitson's confidence are the parts later summaries drop, and they are the parts that affect repeat business.
• Let the buyer's wants lead. Strong's critique is that the aim is what the buyer can get from the goods, not a mental state you induce.
• Test your own funnel. If your data show buyers skipping stages, believe the data over the model.
• Check the founder story. The most repeated attribution in this field turned out to rest on one uncited sentence.

For the lineage around it, read the evolution of selling and who invented modern sales.