Ogilvy on Advertising

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

When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.

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

BRAND IMAGE You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place. The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things – its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and, above all, the nature of

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

Sorry, we’re unable to display this type of content.

Says James Webb Young, one of the best copywriters in history, ‘Every type of advertiser has the same problem: to be believed. The mail-order man knows nothing so potent for this purpose as the testimonial, yet the general advertiser seldom uses 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.

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