1.If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.
2.What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
3.What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.
4.The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
5.The headline is the 'ticket on the meat.' Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.
6.The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
7.On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
8.Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.
9.Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.
10.It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.
11.In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
12.I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
13.I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.
14.Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You've got to believe in the product.
15.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. Do as you would be done by.
16.The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.
17.Once upon a time I was riding on the top of a First Avenue bus, when I heard a mythical housewife say to another, "Molly, my dear, I would have bought that new brand of toilet soap if only they hadn't set the body copy in ten point Garamond." Don't you believe it. What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
18.A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
19.Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
20.Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
-David Ogilvy-
2.What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
3.What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.
4.The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
5.The headline is the 'ticket on the meat.' Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.
6.The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
7.On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
8.Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.
9.Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.
10.It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.
11.In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
12.I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
13.I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.
14.Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You've got to believe in the product.
15.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. Do as you would be done by.
16.The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.
17.Once upon a time I was riding on the top of a First Avenue bus, when I heard a mythical housewife say to another, "Molly, my dear, I would have bought that new brand of toilet soap if only they hadn't set the body copy in ten point Garamond." Don't you believe it. What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
18.A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
19.Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
20.Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
-David Ogilvy-
