David Ogilvy Quotes

There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.

It's not rocket science: The best ads tell great stories. They look and feel like the content you're already consuming. They invite you in. They make you laugh. They teach you something. They also sell.

Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up beneath his notice.

Most advertisers spend millions upon millions of dollars to buy commercial time during the Super Bowl, and millions in creating eye-popping ads, hoping to create catchy, unforgettable commercials. Unfortunately, most Super Bowl commercials end up being unmemorable. Costly mistakes for brands and creative flameouts for advertising firms.

The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

In advertising, sex sells. But only if you're selling sex.

I have learned that you can't have good advertising without a good client, that you can't keep a good client without good advertising, and no client will ever buy better advertising than he understands or has an appetite for.

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.

I think daily deals are a good idea. Any ad people view as content is a good ad, and that's true for daily-deal ads too.

Direct Marketing

In our quest to tweet, like, and trend, we have forgotten that brands can be built through advertising. Ads can generate big ideas that can never be trumped by tactics. That is the magic of an ad, and that is what is missing from many ads today.

Its definition can be a bit murky, but to me, native advertising is a sales pitch that fits right into the flow of the information being shown. It doesn't interrupt - native ads don't pop up or dance across the screen - and its content is actually valuable to the person viewing it.

Advertising is like learning - a little is a dangerous thing. If a man has not the pluck to keep on advertising, all the money he has already spent is lost.

You can define advertising as the science of creating and placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets him or her to take some action.

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

The headline is the most important element in most advertisements. It is the telegram which decides the reader whether to read the copy.

People love advertising in particular but they hate advertising in general.

Claude Hopkins.. maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock.

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

All advertising, whether it lies in the field of business or of politics, will carry success by continuity and regular uniformity of application.

Repeat your winners. If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency.

Impact in advertising today is 80 percent strategy, 20 percent copy. This makes it nearly impossible for good copy to compensate for weak strategy.

Sometimes, the advertising is better than the product. Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. Everyone tries the thing and never buys it again.

The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.