David Ogilvy Quotes

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

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

The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to give it memory value.

Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.

The headline is the 'ticket on the meat.' Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.

A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain't got nothin'.

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

No, sir, I'm not saying that charming, witty and warm copy won't sell. I'm just saying I've seen thousands of charming, witty campaigns that didn't sell.

You must make the product interesting, not just make the ad different. And that's what too many of the copywriters in the U.S. today don't yet understand.

Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret... to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink.

If you have a good selling idea, your secretary can write your ad for you.

Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed... but dull?

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

Writing good ads is easy when you have something to say.

The ingredients for great advertising haven't changed since the 'Mad Men' era: Brands win if their advertising is relevant and people like it.

The headline of an advertisement accounts for 60% of the pull of that ad. In the same way, the start of a letter makes or breaks the letter, because if the start does not interest your reader, he never gets down to the rest of your letter.

I never write fewer than sixteen headlines for a single advertisement.

You have to prove that the Freberg way will sell their product better than if they just did straight advertising. Whenever I give a lecture or seminar, that's what I try to get across to people. I hear very few radio commercials that sound like I could have written them or that they got the idea.

Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it.'

A good ad which is not run never produces sales.

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.

Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can't.

That's a comic cover's job: Attract someone's attention and persuade them to try the issue out.

My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.

The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself.