Ogilvy on Advertising

The present President of Young & Rubicam has said that ‘Rubicam played a marvelous dirty trick on the rest of us – he didn’t leave behind a list of rules.’ He did, however, leave behind an aphorism which appeals to the present generation at Young & Rubicam: resist the usual. Or, as his copy chief Roy Whittier put it, ‘In advertising, the be

First, study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it.

Avoid clients whose ethos is incompatible with yours. I refused Charles Revson of Revlon and Lew Rosenstiel of Schenley. Beware of ventures which spend little or nothing today but might become major advertisers, if all goes well. Servicing such non-accounts can be expensive, and few of them make it.

Copy should be written in the language people use in everyday conversation,

On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 per cent of your money. The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit – like a whiter wash, more miles per gallon, freedom from pimples, fewer cavities.

Now comes research among consumers. Find out how they think about your kind of product, what language they use when they discuss the subject, what attributes are important to them, and what promise would be most likely to make them buy your brand.

Confessions of an Advertising Man still

All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short.

Another way to make headlines hard to read is to superimpose them on your illustration. Another mistake is to put a period at the end of headlines. Periods are also called full stops, because they stop the reader dead in his tracks. You will find no full stops at the end of headlines in newspapers. Yet another common mistake is to set copy in a mea