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The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

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
Products
Leadership
Marketplace
Word
Vocabulary
Business
Consumers
Wells
Advertising
Well
Test
Important
Product
Tests

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I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance.
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The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
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Make sure you have a vice president in charge of your revolution, to engender ferment among your more conventional colleagues.
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It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.
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No sale, no commission. No commission, no eat. That made an impression on me.
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If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.
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David Ogilvy made his copywriters come up 100 different headlines for every ad they wrote.
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If you ever find a man who is better than you are - hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself.
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The more story-appeal there is in the picture or in the photograph, the more people would look at your ad
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I never assign a product to a writer unless I know that he is personally interested in it. Every time I have written a bad campaign, it has been because the product did not interest me.
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Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.
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The trouble with many copywriters in general agencies are that they don't really think in terms of selling. They have never written direct-response they have never tasted blood
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On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.
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Creativity needs discipline and freedom.
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The manufacturer who finds himself up the creek is the short-sighted opportunist who siphons off all his advertising dollars for short-term promotions.
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A lot of today's campaigns are based on optimum positioning but are totally ineffective - because they are dull, or badly constructed, or ineptly written. If nobody reads your advertisement or looks at your commercial, it doesn't do you much good to have the right positioning.
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