Quote

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by.

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
Found
Honest
Consumers
Government
Wife
Buying
Done
Lying
Advertising
Writing
Read
Mines
Never
Family
Mine
Would
Business
Products
Thinking
Write
Lies
Advertisement
Tell
Wouldn
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More quotes by David Ogilvy

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We all have a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost – for support, not for illumination.
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Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.
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The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
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You can't save souls in an empty church.
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What you learn is more important than what you earn.
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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 ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
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The consumer isn't a moron she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.
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Readers travel so fast they don't stop to decipher the meaning of obscure headlines.
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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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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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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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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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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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You have only 30 seconds in a TV commercial. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull. When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire.
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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.
David Ogilvy
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It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look, and read.
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Never use tricky or irrelevant headlines… People read too fast to figure out what you are trying to say.
David Ogilvy
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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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