Ogilvy on Advertising

You can’t save souls in an empty church.

When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.

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

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.

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.’

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

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

Remember the French saying: ‘He who is absent is always wrong.’

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