Home · Book Reports · 2024 · Ogilvy on Advertising

designates my notes. / designates important. / designates very important.

Thoughts

Pages numbers from the pdf.

This is not the book I thought it was. It is not what I wanted to read. It wasn’t useless though, rarely is anything useless. Was it worth my time? As of chapter 5, no. Was it interesting. Sure.

I find it amusing that much of this book focuses on copywriting. This is reasonable of course, but amusing given AI circa 2024 is pretty well displacing copywriters.

There are a couple chapters that focus on actual technique and research used to produce quality advertising. I suspect if/when I read the other Ogilvy book (Confessions) that there will be a lot of overlap. That said, I do plan on reading it. I liked his style and no-nonsense presentation.

• If you would like more guidance on writing headlines, I commend you to John Caples’ book Tested Advertising Methods (Prentice-Hall).

Exceptional Quotes

In your day-to-day dealings with clients and colleagues, fight for the kings, queens and bishops, but throw away the pawns. A habit of graceful surrender on trivial issues will make you difficult to resist when you stand and fight on a major issue.

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 each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.’

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.

If you are advertising a kind of product which is only bought by a small group of people put a word in your headline which will flag them down, like ‘asthma’, ‘bedwetters’, ‘women over 35’.

Starch reports that headlines with more than ten words get less readership than short headlines. On the other hand, a study of retail advertisements found that headlines of ten words sell more merchandise than short headlines. Conclusion: if you need a long headline, go ahead and write one, and if you want a short headline, that’s all right too.

Specifics work better than generalities.

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

When you advertise in local newspapers, you get better results if you include the name of each city in your headline. People are most interested in what is happening where they live.

The kind of photographs which work hardest are those which arouse the reader’s curiosity. He glances at the photograph and says to himself, ‘What goes on here?’ Then he reads your copy to find out. Harold Rudolph called this magic element Story Appeal’ and demonstrated that the more of it you inject into your photographs, the more people look at your advertisements.

It pays to illustrate the end result of using your product. Before-and- after photographs seem to fascinate readers. In a study of 70 campaigns whose sales results were known, Gallup did not find a single before- and-after campaign that did not increase sales.

The use of characters known to people who see your television commercials boosts the recall of your print advertisements.

My brother Francis once asked a Cockney editor of the Daily Mirror (London) what kind of photographs most interested his readers. He answered, Babies with an ’eart-throb, animals with an ’eart-throb, and what you might call sex.’ This is still true today.

Do not, however, address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. 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.

If you include a testimonial in your copy, you make it more credible. Readers find the endorsements of fellow consumers more persuasive than the puffery of anonymous copywriters.

Always try to include the price of your products. You may see a necklace in a jeweler’s window, but you don’t consider buying it because the price is not shown and you are too shy to go in and ask. It is the same way with advertisements. When the price of the product is left out, people have a way of turning the page.

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

Readers look first at the illustration, then at the headline, then at the copy. So put these elements in that order – illustration at the top, headline under the illustration, copy under the headline. This follows the normal order of scanning, which is from top to bottom.

More people read the captions under illustrations than read the body copy, so never use an illustration without putting a caption under it. Your caption should include the brand name and the promise.

There is no law which says that advertisements have to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract more readers.

Another mistake is to put a period at the end of headlines.

If you start your body copy with a drop-initial you increase readership by an average of 13 per cent.

Limit your opening paragraph to a maximum of 11 words.

After two or three inches of copy, insert a cross-head, and thereafter throughout. Cross-heads keep the reader marching forward. Make some of them interrogative, to excite curiosity in the next run of copy.

When I was a boy, it was common practice to square up paragraphs. It is now known that widows – short lines – increase readership.

Set key paragraphs in bold face or italic.

Help the reader into your paragraphs with arrowheads, bullets, asterisks and marginal marks.

If you have a lot of unrelated facts to recite, don’t use cumbersome connectives. Simply number them – as I am doing here.

Headlines get five times the readership of the body copy. If your headline doesn’t sell, you have wasted your money. Your headline should promise a benefit, or deliver news, or offer a service, or tell a significant story, or recognize a problem, or quote a satisfied customer.

Captions should appear under all your photographs. Twice as many people read them as read body copy. And use your captions to sell. The best captions are mini-advertisements in themselves.

• This feels like memes today.

In direct mail, testing is the name of the game.

Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet the majority of campaigns contain no promise whatever. (That is the most important sentence in this book. Read it again.)

In a study of the causes of inflation, the French Government cut thousands of cheeses in half and put them on sale. One half were marked 37 centimes, the other 56 centimes. The higher-priced cheese sold faster. Consumers judge the quality of product by its price.

Thirty-two per cent of beer-drinkers drink 80 per cent of all beer. Twenty- three per cent of laxative users consume 80 per cent of all laxatives. Fourteen per cent of the people who drink gin consume 80 per cent of all the gin.

In everything you do, keep your eye glued to the heavy users. They are unlike occasional users in their motivations.

• Whales.

When [Rubicam] was made a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1974, he said in his acceptance speech, The national obsession with television is decreasing the literacy of the nation’s children and making the job of the schools much tougher. It is also obsessing the country with crime. Industry and advertising could perform a huge public service if they could induce the television networks to cut down the advertising and cut down the crime.’

Table of Contents

• 00: Introduction
• 01: Overture
• 02: How to Produce Advertising That Sells
• 03: Jobs in Advertising – and How to Get Them
• 04: How to Run an Advertising Agency
• 05: How to Get Clients
• 06: Open Letter to a Client in Search of an Agency
• 07: Wanted: A Renaissance in Print Advertising
• 08: How to Make TV Commercials that Sell
• 09: Advertising Corporations
• 10: How to Advertise Foreign Travel
• 11: The Secrets of Success in Business-to-Business Advertising
• 12: Direct Mail, My First Love and Secret Weapon
• 13: Advertising for Good Causes
• 14: Competing with Procter & Gamble
• 15: 18 Miracles of Research
• 16: What Little I Know About Marketing
• 17: Is America Still Top Nation?
• 18: Lasker, Resor, Rubicam, Burnett, Hopkins AND Bernbach
• 19: What’s Wrong with Advertising?
• 20: I Predict 13 Changes

· Chapter 01 - Overture

page 7:

• Meanwhile, most of the advertising techniques which worked when I wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man still work today. Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on. All over the world.

· Chapter 02 - How to Produce Advertising That Sells

page 14:

• 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 the product itself. Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image. It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year.

• Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it’s Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it’s Jack Daniel’s. Ask them which they prefer. They’ll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images.

• I have always been hypnotized by Jack Daniel’s. The label and the advertising convey an image of homespun honesty, and the high price makes me assume that Jack Daniel’s must be superior.

page 18:

• Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency.

• You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to couples who got married last year will probably be just as successful with couples who get married this year. A good advertisement can be thought of as a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping.

• The best way to settle such arguments is to measure the selling effectiveness of your campaign at regular intervals and to go on running it until the research shows that it has worn out.

page 19:

• Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing.

‘Search the parks in all your cities You’ll find no statues of committees.’

page 24:

• Advertising reflects the mores of society, but does not influence them. Thus it is that you find more explicit sex in magazines and novels than in advertisements. The word ‘fuck’ is commonplace in contemporary literature, but has yet to appear in advertisements.

page 25:

• The Health Education Council in England uses advertising to encourage girls to get free contraceptives from Family Planning Clinics.

page 42:

· Chapter 03 - Jobs in Advertising – and How to Get Them

page 46:

• Some agencies now hire more women account executives than men. In the New York office of Ogilvy & Mather, 69 per cent of the account executives are women.

• That 1980’s sexism…

page 48:

• In your day-to-day dealings with clients and colleagues, fight for the kings, queens and bishops, but throw away the pawns. A habit of graceful surrender on trivial issues will make you difficult to resist when you stand and fight on a major issue.

page 52:

• Like most boys of my generation, I started life believing that women belonged in the home, until I noticed how much happier my mother was when she went out to work.

• there are now 52 women Vice-Presidents in the New York office of Ogilvy & Mather, and there appears to be no resentment of them among the male staff.

• The majority of people now being recruited by advertising agencies in the United States for so-called ‘professional’ jobs are women.

· Chapter 04 - How to Run an Advertising Agency

page 64:

• 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 each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.’

· Chapter 05 - How to Get Clients

page 85:

• Aside: I have resigned accounts five times as often as I have been fired, and always for the same reason: the client’s behavior was eroding the morale of the people working on his account. Erosion of morale does unacceptable damage to an agency.

· Chapter 06 - Open Letter to a Client in Search of an Agency

· Chapter 07 - Wanted: A Renaissance in Print Advertising

page 101:

• 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.

page 102:

• If you are advertising a kind of product which is only bought by a small group of people put a word in your headline which will flag them down, like ‘asthma’, ‘bedwetters’, ‘women over 35’.

• Starch reports that headlines with more than ten words get less readership than short headlines. On the other hand, a study of retail advertisements found that headlines of ten words sell more merchandise than short headlines. Conclusion: if you need a long headline, go ahead and write one, and if you want a short headline, that’s all right too.

• Specifics work better than generalities.

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

• When you advertise in local newspapers, you get better results if you include the name of each city in your headline. People are most interested in what is happening where they live.

page 103:

• If you would like more guidance on writing headlines, I commend you to John Caples’ book Tested Advertising Methods (Prentice-Hall).

• The kind of photographs which work hardest are those which arouse the reader’s curiosity. He glances at the photograph and says to himself, ‘What goes on here?’ Then he reads your copy to find out. Harold Rudolph called this magic element Story Appeal’ and demonstrated that the more of it you inject into your photographs, the more people look at your advertisements.

• It pays to illustrate the end result of using your product. Before-and- after photographs seem to fascinate readers. In a study of 70 campaigns whose sales results were known, Gallup did not find a single before- and-after campaign that did not increase sales.

page 104:

• The use of characters known to people who see your television commercials boosts the recall of your print advertisements.

page 105:

• My brother Francis once asked a Cockney editor of the Daily Mirror (London) what kind of photographs most interested his readers. He answered, Babies with an ’eart-throb, animals with an ’eart-throb, and what you might call sex.’ This is still true today.

page 106:

• Do not, however, address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. 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.

page 107:

• If you include a testimonial in your copy, you make it more credible. Readers find the endorsements of fellow consumers more persuasive than the puffery of anonymous copywriters.

page 108:

• Always try to include the price of your products. You may see a necklace in a jeweler’s window, but you don’t consider buying it because the price is not shown and you are too shy to go in and ask. It is the same way with advertisements. When the price of the product is left out, people have a way of turning the page.

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

• This reminds me of the 3,000 word, no frills, landing page.

page 110:

• Direct-response advertisers know that short copy doesn’t sell. In split- run tests, long copy invariably outsells short copy.

• But I must warn you that if you want your long copy to be read, you had better write it well. In particular, your first paragraph should be a grabber.

page 111:

• Readers look first at the illustration, then at the headline, then at the copy. So put these elements in that order – illustration at the top, headline under the illustration, copy under the headline. This follows the normal order of scanning, which is from top to bottom.

• More people read the captions under illustrations than read the body copy, so never use an illustration without putting a caption under it. Your caption should include the brand name and the promise.

• There is no law which says that advertisements have to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract more readers.

page 115:

• Another mistake is to put a period at the end of headlines.

• If you have to set very long copy, there are some typographical devices which increase its readership:

• A subhead of two lines, between your headline and your body copy, heightens the reader’s appetite for the feast to come.

page 116:

• If you start your body copy with a drop-initial you increase readership by an average of 13 per cent.

• Limit your opening paragraph to a maximum of 11 words.

• After two or three inches of copy, insert a cross-head, and thereafter throughout. Cross-heads keep the reader marching forward. Make some of them interrogative, to excite curiosity in the next run of copy.

• When I was a boy, it was common practice to square up paragraphs. It is now known that widows – short lines – increase readership.

• Set key paragraphs in bold face or italic.

• Help the reader into your paragraphs with arrowheads, bullets, asterisks and marginal marks.

• If you have a lot of unrelated facts to recite, don’t use cumbersome connectives. Simply number them – as I am doing here.

· Chapter 08 - How to Make TV Commercials that Sell

page 159:

• Emotion. Researchers have not yet found a way to quantify the effectiveness of emotion, but I have come to believe that commercials with a large content of nostalgia, charm and even sentimentality can be enormously effective.

page 162:

• Voice-over or on-camera? Research shows that it is more difficult to hold your audience if you use voice-over. It is better to have the actors talk on camera.

· Chapter 09 - Advertising Corporations

page 179:

• Many corporations have told me that they need only reach ‘thought leaders’ – the people who influence other people. This sounds sensible, and not too expensive. The problem is that nobody really knows who the thought leaders are. Bishops? Bartenders? Political busybodies? Garrulous taxi drivers? Thought leaders are spread throughout the population.

• This is silly. We know who the thought leaders are and have known for over a century. This paragraph all but proves he has never read Propaganda.

· Chapter 10 - How to Advertise Foreign Travel

· Chapter 11 - The Secrets of Success in Business-to-Business Advertising

page 210:

• Some copywriters, assuming that the reader will find the product as boring as they do, try to inveigle him into their ads with pictures of babies, beagles and bosoms.

page 211:

• Headlines get five times the readership of the body copy. If your headline doesn’t sell, you have wasted your money. Your headline should promise a benefit, or deliver news, or offer a service, or tell a significant story, or recognize a problem, or quote a satisfied customer.

• Captions should appear under all your photographs. Twice as many people read them as read body copy. And use your captions to sell. The best captions are mini-advertisements in themselves.

• This feels like memes today.

· Chapter 12 - Direct Mail, My First Love and Secret Weapon

page 220:

• In direct mail, testing is the name of the game.

page 225:

• Successful Direct Marketing Methods by Bob Stone, published by Crain Books in Chicago.

· Chapter 13 - Advertising for Good Causes

· Chapter 14 - Competing with Procter & Gamble

· Chapter 15 - 18 Miracles of Research

page 245:

• Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet the majority of campaigns contain no promise whatever. (That is the most important sentence in this book. Read it again.)

page 246:

• Research can tell you whether your advertising communicates what you want it to communicate. Keep in mind E. B. White’s warning, When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.’

page 247:

• Gallup invented a method of measuring readership. He interviewed representative samples of readers, took them through the newspaper and had them point to the things they had read. It came as a surprise to editors when he reported that more people read the comics than their editorials, and that captions under photographs were read by more people than the articles. When he repeated the same research in Britain, he got the same results. During World War II my brother Francis, then a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force, slept in the underground bunker which was the center of the high command. He told me that when the Generals, Admirals and Air Marshals came into breakfast, they looked at the comic strips in the Daily Mirror before they read the headlines in The Times.

page 249:

• When Gone With the Wind was a runaway best seller, we asked a cross- section of the adult population whether they had read it. The number of yes replies was obviously inflated; people did not want to admit that they hadn’t read it. The following week we put the question differently: ‘Do you plan to read Gone With the Wind?’ It was easy for those who hadn’t read it to answer yes, they planned to read it, while those who had already read it said so. This produced a credible result.

• A food manufacturer had to decide whether to sell his product in cans or glass jars. He guessed that some housewives would vote for glass because they thought glass sounded more prestigious, so he gave out samples of his product in glass and other samples in cans. Two weeks later he called back and asked the housewives which samples tasted better. A large majority declared that the product in the jars tasted better than the same product in the cans. Without knowing it, they were voting for glass.

• In a study of the causes of inflation, the French Government cut thousands of cheeses in half and put them on sale. One half were marked 37 centimes, the other 56 centimes. The higher-priced cheese sold faster. Consumers judge the quality of product by its price.

· Chapter 16 - What Little I Know About Marketing

page 259:

• It has become prohibitively expensive to launch brands aimed at a dominant share-of-market. Even the manufacturers with the biggest war chests are finding it more profitable to aim their new brands at narrowly defined segments of the market.

page 261:

• Thirty-two per cent of beer-drinkers drink 80 per cent of all beer. Twenty- three per cent of laxative users consume 80 per cent of all laxatives. Fourteen per cent of the people who drink gin consume 80 per cent of all the gin.

• In everything you do, keep your eye glued to the heavy users. They are unlike occasional users in their motivations.

• Whales.

page 263:

• Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. ‘Standing room only’ creates an atmosphere of success, as in theaters and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure.

· Chapter 17 - Is America Still Top Nation?

· Chapter 18 - Lasker, Resor, Rubicam, Burnett, Hopkins AND Bernbach

page 290:

• Lasker was more than an advertising man. In 1918 he came under the influence of Theodore Roosevelt, and this led to his taking four years off as the head of propaganda for the Republican Party and later the chairman of the Shipping Board. In those days he was a militant isolationist, but he lived to become one of Wendell Wilkie’s strongest supporters in the One World movement, and did everything he could to advance the foreign policy of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

page 292:

• [Lasker] once said, ‘I didn’t want to make a great fortune. I wanted to show what I could do with my brains.’

page 294:

• It was Helen Resor who insisted that the agency’s offices should be decorated with antique furniture, each executive being allowed to choose the period he liked the best. She was said to believe that if their offices were more attractive than their homes, they would work longer hours.

• In some ways, Helen Resor was more than Stanley. She was one of the founders of the Planned Parenthood movement

page 298:

• When [Rubicam] was made a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1974, he said in his acceptance speech, The national obsession with television is decreasing the literacy of the nation’s children and making the job of the schools much tougher. It is also obsessing the country with crime. Industry and advertising could perform a huge public service if they could induce the television networks to cut down the advertising and cut down the crime.’

• He used to say, The client remembers an outstanding job years after he has forgotten that it was two months late.’

page 299:

• Roy Whittier put it, In advertising, the beginning of greatness is to be different, and the beginning of failure is to be the same.’

page 303:

• [Hopkins] held that nobody with a college education should be allowed to write copy for the mass market.

· Chapter 19 - What’s Wrong with Advertising?

page 322:

• My only other example of manipulation will make you shudder. I myself once came near to doing something so diabolical that I hesitate to confess it even now, 30 years later. Suspecting that hypnotism might be an element in successful advertising, I engaged a professional hypnotist to make a commercial. When I saw it in the projection room, it was so powerful that I had visions of millions of suggestible consumers getting up from their armchairs and rushing like zombies through the traffic on their way to buy the product at the nearest store. Had I invented the ultimate advertisement? I burned it, and never told my client how close I had come to landing him in a national scandal.

· Chapter 20 - I Predict 13 Changes