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If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.

David Ogilvy

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David Ogilvy
Age: 88 †
Born: 1911
Born: June 23
Died: 1999
Died: July 21
Businessman
Businessperson
Economist
Writer
West Horsley
Surrey
David MacKenzie Ogilvy
Sells
Design
Humor
Wise
Creative
Doesn
Witty
Advertising
Sell

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Headlines can be strengthend by the inclusion of emotional words like darling, love, fear, proud, friend and baby.
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The consumer isn't a moron she is your wife.
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I never write fewer than sixteen headlines for a single advertisement.
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The mission of a great school is not to cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them...This gives many boys such a distaste for learning that they never read another book as long as they live. No, the mission is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship - a taste which will last you all your life.
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David Ogilvy made his copywriters come up 100 different headlines for every ad they wrote.
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Why do eight out of ten new consumer products fail? Sometimes because they are too new. The first cold cereals were rejected by consumers. More often new products fail because they are not new enough.
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If you can’t advertise yourself, what hope do you have of advertising anything else?
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The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be. Before people making a buying decision, they have many questions. For example, why they should buy from you, why your product is better than other similar products, why they should trust you, and why they should buy it now, etc.
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What you learn is more important than what you earn.
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The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
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On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.
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Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.
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Madison Avenue is full of masochists who unconsciously provoke rejection by their clients. I know brilliant men who have lost every account they have ever handled.
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It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.
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I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.
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Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving. Testing was used in advertising decades ago. The internet has made testing so easy that every online marketer can use it to improve advertising results. Google content experiment is a free tool for you to do split testing.
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In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
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We exist to build the business of our clients. The recommendations we make to them should be the recommendations we would make if we owned their companies, without regard to our own short-term interest. This earns their respect, which is the greatest asset we can have.
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Our offices must always be headed by the kind of men who command respect. Not phonies, zeros or bastards.
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The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore...... Pretend to be vastly interested in any subject the prospects shows an interest in.
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