Quote

Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don't live up to them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second rate work.

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
Give
Demoralizing
Live
Tolerate
Nothing
Boss
Giving
Excellence
Work
Rate
People
Standards
Second
Exorbitant
Hell
Tolerates

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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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Training should not be confined to trainees. It should be a continuous process, and should include the entire professional staff of the agency. The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients.
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While you are responsible to your clients for sales results, you are responsible to consumers for the kind of advertising you bring into their homes.
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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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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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I never write fewer than sixteen headlines for a single advertisement.
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Experience has taught me that advertisers get the best results when they pay their agency a flat fee. It is unrealistic to expect your agency to be impartial when its vested interest lies wholly in the direction of increasing your commissionable advertising.
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On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.
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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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The consumer isn't a moron she is your wife.
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The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their character. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it.
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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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Readers travel so fast they don't stop to decipher the meaning of obscure headlines.
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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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Positioning should be decided before the advertising is created
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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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Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.
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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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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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