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

David Ogilvy

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Buy Consumer Decision Form
A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Attention Draw Goodness Product Sale
Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Influence Reflection Society
Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Sale
What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Important Yourself
The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
DAVID OGILVY

Best Funny Ideas Possible Thinking Yourself
There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Editor Need Yourself
Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Campaign Exception Live Wife World
Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.
DAVID OGILVY

Believe Goodness Live Product Writing Yourself
It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Consumer Himself Honesty Wife
Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertising Economy Enemy Freedom Person Removal Society Transformation
Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertising Dangerous Enemy Ignorance Research Signal
Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.
DAVID OGILVY

Business Idiot Infest Ourselves Pretend
Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.
DAVID OGILVY

Company Goal Immortal
The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Information Persuasion
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.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Head Kind Product Reading Ticket
If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.
DAVID OGILVY

Creative Sale
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Entertainment Information Regard
Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Committee Creation Mess See Television
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.
DAVID OGILVY

Brand Decision Image Market People Personality Place Yourself
Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Family Myself Reading Writing
I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Avoid Awkward Cash Client Factor Myself Purpose
The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
DAVID OGILVY

Career Life Secret Time
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
DAVID OGILVY

Business Creativity Original Thinking World Yourself
Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left. It’s totally dishonest.
DAVID OGILVY

Advertisement Honesty Politics Stop
Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.
DAVID OGILVY

Goal Hire Leaving People Remark Settle Yourself
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.
DAVID OGILVY

Average Money People Reading Time Yourself

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

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

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Popular Authors

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