David Ogilvy Quotes

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?

When you go to commercial, you want something to call the viewers back, and if you don't have a decent act out, the audience probably won't be there in the numbers you want when the show returns.

When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.

People dont pay attention until they have to

It is easy to understand why conflict is so often highlighted: Writers of headlines or promotional copy want to catch attention and attract an audience. They are usually under time pressure, which lures them to established, conventionalized ways of expressing ideas in the absence of leisure to think up entirely new ones.

The lens through which I view the media world is pretty simple: If you are in the business of sucking up attention, then you are in the media business.

I'm in the industry, and I'll fast-forward through the ads most of the time. But I'll stop for the good ones.

I think getting people's focus, getting people's attention on anything has never been harder, because the media has done everything in its power to try and dissolve people's attention, shift it round absolutely all the time.

Television is on a small screen, inside someone's living room, so you have to grab their attention while they are having dinner or cooking or doing something else.

People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.

You want people to watch what you're doing.

The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt.

Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do.

Addicts sometimes have a penchant for becoming the center of attention at other people's celebrations.

It's hard to get people to focus on one idea.

Every time I have people over, I watch how long they look at every part of the painting, or pictures on my computer. I have a few close friends and people that are constants. Whether I like their opinion or not, I've been hearing it for a long time and I can use it as this constant. I mentally pay attention to how long they look at every image, which ones they pause on and what parts of it they look at.

People don’t pay much attention to anything unless you give them reason to

What I've learned is, if I have to go out and speak, the best way to get people's attention is to tell them a story, tell them a story that came from my corazón.

We are such a sound-bite culture; people are so accustomed to flipping through their television so quickly that we only have just a few seconds to grab someone's attention.

To be a success in advertising you must want to fill other people with a passion for possession.

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It’s sort of a blog for people with attention spans.

It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look, and read.

You aren't advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who'll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.

The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.

People's attentions spans are getting shorter and shorter. I don't want to cater to that necessarily but, just for myself, it feels like more than 40 minutes of music is too much.