David Ogilvy Quotes

Concentrate your time, your brains, and your advertising money on your successes. Back your winners, and abandon your losers.

Most readers look at the photograph first. If you put it in the middle of the page, the reader will start by looking in the middle. Then her eye must go up to read the headline; this doesn't work, because people have a habit of scanning downwards. However, suppose a few readers do read the headline after seeing the photograph below it. After that, you require them to jump down past the photograph which they have already seen. Not bloody likely.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.

I once found myself conspiring with a president of the Board of Trade as to how we might persuade H.M. Treasury to cough up more money for the British Travel advertising in America. Said Sir David Eccles, “Why does any American in his senses spend his holidays in the cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under Italian advertising is the answer.” Quite so.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Before them, obstacles vanish into thin air and mountains crumble into atoms.

Today, almost all our layouts look “addy.” Too bad. How do you sell editorial layouts to clients? Try saying, “Would you like the editors of a half a dozen magazines to devote a whole page to your product?” The client will reply, “Yes, of course. But it is impossible.” You say, “It is possible. You buy the space and here is your editorial. Better than any advertisement, isn't it?”

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.

Take whiskey. Why do some people chose Jack Daniel’s, while others choose Grand Dad or Taylor? Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don’t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn’t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is 90 per cent of what the distiller has to sell. Researchers

Queen Victoria complained that Gladstone talked to her as if he were addressing a public meeting. She preferred Disraeli, who talked to her like a human being. When you write copy, follow Disraeli’s example.

As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?

Most good copywriters’, says William Maynard of the Bates agency, ‘fall into two categories. Poets. And killers.

When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another, second person singular.

Don't bunt.

Some years ago a prayer was read from the pulpit in every church in Greece, asking the Almighty to spare the Greeks from the ‘scourge’ of foreign tourism.

When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’ Pursuit