Quote

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.

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
Business
Readers
Copy
Together
Marketing
Clients
Writing
Advertising
Behalf
People
Letters
Address
Reader
Copies
Stadium
Alone
Letter
Client
Though
Addresses
Stadiums
Read
Pretend
Gathered

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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.
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The business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull.... our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.
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I don't believe in tricky advertising, I don't believe in cute advertising, I don't believe in comic advertising. The people who perpetrate that kind of advertising never had to sell anything in their lives
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Study the methods of your competitors and do the exact opposite.
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David Ogilvy made his copywriters come up 100 different headlines for every ad they wrote.
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Never use tricky or irrelevant headlines… People read too fast to figure out what you are trying to say.
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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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Consumers don't think how they feel. They don't say what they think and they don't do what they say.
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It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.
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You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.
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Leaders grasp nettles.
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Compete with the immortals
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I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.
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People don't buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television last night.
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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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Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.
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Great hospitals do two things. They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people.
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Few of the great creators have bland personalities. They are cantankerous egotists, the kind of men who are unwelcome in the modern corporation.
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