Ogilvy on Advertising

When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: ‘If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if e

When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.

When you put your headline in quotes, you increase recall by an average of 28 per cent.

At the start of your career in advertising, what you learn is more important than what you earn.

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Aldous Huxley, who was once a copywriter, said, ‘It is easier to write ten passably effective sonnets than one effective advertisement.’ You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.

POSITIONING Now consider how you want to ‘position’ your product. This curious verb is in great favor among marketing experts, but no two of them agree what it means. My own definition is ‘what the product does, and who it is for’. I could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position it as a toilet

Very few advertisements are read by more than one reader in 20. I conclude that editors communicate better than admen.

You can’t save souls in an empty church.