Reading Notes–Ogilvy on Advertising

Ogilvy, just this name, makes all introduction needless and verbose.

But you may doubt, are the master’s pre-internet techniques still relevant in 2019 ?

I believe so.

In the last 2 years, I used Ogilvy’s two books as my guideline in selling courses on Wechat Official Account – a subscribe-and-push platform like mailing list, prevailing in China, and it really helped :)

The version I read: First Vintage Books Edition, March 1985

My rating: 9/10, I’ve only finished chapters that interests me

I rate it 9/10, not 10/10, mainly because I’ve already read Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, and the master retold some of his legend and recipe again in this book, not so dazzling as the first one.

You can also find my notes on Confessions of an Advertising Man here, but in Chinese language.

1.All advertisements are born equal, but some advertisements are born more equal than others

Says John Caples, the doyen of direct response copywriters: ‘I have seen one advertisement actually sell not twice as much, not three times as much, but 19½ times as much as another. Both advertisements occupied the same space. Both were run in the same publication. Both had photographic illustrations. Both had carefully written copy. The difference was that one used the right appeal and the other used the wrong appeal.’

I am told that George Hay Brown, at one time head of marketing research at Ford, inserted advertisements in every other copy of the Reader’s Digest. At the end of the year, the people who had not been exposed to the advertising had bought more Fords than those who had.

2.The crucial ingredient of advertisements is promise

Meanwhile, most of the advertising techniques which worked when I wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man still work today. Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on. All over the world.

Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet the majority of campaigns contain no promise whatever. (That is the most important sentence in this book. Read it again.)

They (Procter & Gamble) always promise the consumer one important benefit. When they perceive that there is an opportunity to increase sales by promising more than one, they sometimes run two campaigns at the same time – often in the same medium.

Try to find a promise which is not only persuasive, but also unique. For example, ‘makes a perfect cup of coffee every time’ may get the highest score on persuasion, but it is not unique. You may find that ‘gets you clean’ is the winning promise for a soap, but I doubt if it is sufficiently unique to make the cash register ring.

In my experience, the selection of the promise is the most valuable contribution that research can make to the advertising process. One method is to show the consumer a number of promises, telling him or her that each promise is for a new product. The consumer is asked to rate the promises for importance and uniqueness.

3.The key difference between a master and a copywriting newbie lies in their headlines

On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 per cent of your money. The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit – like a whiter wash, more miles per gallon, freedom from pimples, fewer cavities.

In print advertisements, your headline is the most important element. The other day I saw one headline produce five times as many orders as another. If your headline promises your strongest and most distinct benefit, you are on your way to success.

Some copywriters write tricky headlines – double meanings, puns and other obscurities. This is counter-productive. In the average newspaper your headline has to compete with 350 others. Readers travel fast through this jungle. Your headline should telegraph what you want to say.

If you are advertising a kind of product which is only bought by a small group of people, put a word in your headline which will flag them down, like asthma, bedwetters, women over thirty-five.

I advise you to include the brand name in your headline.

I used the word ‘darling’ in the headline for this ad because a psychologist had tested hundreds of words for their emotional impact and ‘darling’ had come out top.

Another technique, which I prefer, is not favored by researchers, perhaps because it is so simple and does not require their services. You write two advertisements for your product, each with a different promise in the headline. At the end of the copy you offer a free sample of the product. You then run the advertisements in a newspaper or magazine, in such a way that half the circulation gets one headline, and the other half gets the other headline.

Specifics work better than generalities. When research reported that the average shopper thought Sears Roebuck made a profit of 37 per cent on sales, I headlined an advertisement Sears makes a profit of 5 per cent. This specific was more persuasive than saying that Sears’ profit was ‘less than you might suppose’ or something equally vague.

If you are lucky enough to have some news to tell, don’t bury it in your body copy, which nine out of ten people will not read. State it loud and clear in your headline. And don’t scorn tried-and-true words like amazing, introducing, now, suddenly.

One of the most famous advertisements ever written was by John Caples for International Correspondence School, under the headline ‘They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano – But When I Started to Play …’.

Another mistake is to put a period at the end of headlines. Periods are also called full stops, because they stop the reader dead in his tracks. You will find no full stops at the end of headlines in newspapers.

If you would like more guidance on writing headlines, I commend you to John Caples’ book Tested Advertising Methods (Prentice-Hall).

For lanolin as a cure for baldness: Have you ever seen a bald-headed sheep? For a pile remedy: Send us your dollar and we’ll cure your piles, or keep your dollar and keep your piles. ( Ogilvy’s favorite headlines )

4.Please do your homework

When I got the Rolls-Royce account, I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across a statement that ‘at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.’ This became the headline, and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy.

Before I wrote this – the most famous of all automobile ads – I did my homework. It ran only in two newspapers and two magazines, at a cost of $25,000. The following year, Ford based their multi-million dollar campaign on the claim that their car was even quieter than a Rolls.

Informal conversations with half-a-dozen housewives can sometimes help a copywriter more than formal surveys in which he does not participate.

Find out how they think about your kind of product, what language they use when they discuss the subject, what attributes are important to them, and what promise would be most likely to make them buy your brand.

Your next chore is to find out what kind of advertising your competitors have been doing for similar products, and with what success. This will give you your bearings.

5.Research won’t ruin your masterpiece copy

The best fun I ever had was in the early days of Ogilvy & Mather, when I was both Research Director and Creative Director. On Friday afternoons I wrote research reports to the Creative Director. On Monday mornings I changed hats, read my reports and decided what to do about them – if anything. In due course I was able to afford the services of Stanley Canter, a far better researcher. It took Stanley only ten days to get me out of his department. Like I always say, hire people who are better than you are.

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

I have seen ideas so wild that nobody in his senses would dare to use them – until research found that they worked. When I had the idea of writing headlines for French tourism in French, my partners told me I was nuts – until research revealed that French headlines were more effective than English headlines. Research has also saved me from making some horrendous mistakes.

Gallup invented a method of measuring readership. He interviewed representative samples of readers, took them through the newspaper and had them point to the things they had read. It came as a surprise to editors when he reported that more people read the comics then their editorials, and that captions under photographs were read by more people than the articles.

When Gone With the Wind was a runaway best seller, we asked a cross-section of the adult population whether they had read it. The number of yes replies was obviously inflated; people did not want to admit that they hadn’t read it. The following week we put the question differently: ‘Do you plan to read Gone With the Wind?’ It was easy for those who hadn’t read it to answer yes, they planned to read it, while those who had already read it said so. This produced a credible result.

Respondents do not always tell the truth to interviewers. I used to start my questionnaires by asking, ‘Which would you rather hear on the radio tonight – Jack Benny or a Shakespeare play?’ If the respondent said Shakespeare, I knew he was a liar and broke off the interview.

Research can tell you whether your advertising communicates what you want it to communicate. Keep in mind E. B. White’s warning, ‘When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

Research can determine what ‘line extension’ is likely to sell best. After Dove carved out a profitable niche in the soap market, Lever Brothers fell to wondering what other products could be marketed under the same name. Research revealed that a liquid for washing dishes stood the best chance, and it was successfully introduced.

By comparing what they said about the commercial and what they say about the product itself, you find out whether your commercial does your product justice. If it doesn’t, you can usually fix it.

5.You can steal some techniques from P&G

Most important of all, they have a way of creating products which are superior to their competitors’. And, by blind in-home tests, they make sure that the superiority is apparent to the consumer.

If the product is for use in the bathroom, they show it in a bathroom, not in a laboratory.

While their commercials are often extremely competitive, they do not spend their money naming competing brands. They refer to ‘the other leading detergent’.

Less than half their commercials include a ‘reason why’. They have come to think it sufficient to show consumers what the product will do for them, without explaining why it does it.

To get a broad trial quickly, they distribute home-delivered samples on a massive scale. In 1977 their Chairman said, ‘The largest part of our initial investment is usually in the form of introductory sampling.…Only when satisfied customers have had firsthand experience with the product will the elements of the marketing mix, such as advertising and selling, be fully productive.’

The best of all ways to beat P&G is, of course, to market a better product. Bell Brand potato chips defeated P&G’s Pringles because they tasted better. And Rave overtook Lilt in less than a year because, not containing ammonia, it is a better product.

6.Ogilvy’s reminiscence of other advertising giants

All six of them were American. All six had other jobs before they went into advertising. At least five were gluttons for work, and uncompromising perfectionists. Four made their reputations as copywriters. Only three had university degrees.

Bill Bernbach

He was a philosopher. He lived without ostentation, and organized his time with a self-discipline that is rare among heads of agencies. He once told me that he never stayed in the office after five, never took work home, and never worked at weekends. ‘You see, David, I love my family.’

He spoke in a quiet voice and looked modest. But he wasn’t. The last time I saw him, he and Rosser Reeves were my guests at lunch. Bill lectured Rosser and me as if we were trainees in his agency.

He worshipped at the altar of originality, and was never tired of denouncing research as the enemy of creativity.

I am told that he used to carry a card which bore the self-admonition Maybe he’s right.

Claude Hopkins

‘Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around the table.’

‘Ad writers forget they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause.’

‘Whenever possible we introduce a personality into our ads. By making a man famous we make his product famous.’

By exorcizing the pseudo-literary pretentions endemic in British copywriters of my vintage, and concentrating my thoughts on the obligation of advertising to sell, Claude Hopkins’ book, Scientific Advertising, changed the course of my life.

He held that nobody with a college education should be allowed to write copy for the mass market. I know what he meant.

Raymond Rubicam abhorred Hopkins, believing that he had devoted his life to cheating the public. He once told me, ‘You are Claude Hopkins with a college education.’ A backhanded compliment if ever I heard one.

A few of his conclusions have been disproved by later research. We now know, for example, that he was wrong when he said, ‘In every ad consider only new customers. People using your product are not going to read your ads.’ The fact is that users of a product read its advertisements more than non-users.

Leo Burnett

During the 36 years I have been in the agency business I have always been naïvely guided by the principle that if we do not believe in the products we advertise strongly enough to use them ourselves, we are not completely honest with ourselves in advertising them to others. – from Leo Burnett’s memo

He liked earthy, vernacular phrases, and kept a folder on his desk labeled Corny Language. ‘I do not mean maxims, gags or slang in its ordinary sense, but words, phrases and analogies which convey a feeling of sod-buster honesty and drive home a point. I sometimes run across these phrases in a newspaper story or in a chance conversation. I chuck them into the folder and one of them might show up in an ad years later.’

He did not admire originality for its own sake, and used to quote an old boss of his: ‘If you insist on being different just for the sake of being different, you can always come down in the morning with a sock in your mouth.’

His attitude to the creative process can be summed up in three things he said:

1 ‘There is an inherent drama in every product. Our No. 1 job is to dig for it and capitalize on it.’

2 ‘When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’

3 ‘Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honor and obey your hunches.’

Raymond Rubicam

‘State your business,’ he barked. ‘I want to pick your brains,’ I replied.

He was my patron, inspiration, counselor, critic and conscience. I was his hero-worshipping disciple.

But the achievement of which Rubicam was most proud was a larger one. In old age he told me, ‘Advertising has a responsibility to behave properly. I proved that you can sell products without bamboozling the American public.’ While he had no monopoly on this virtue, he had more right than anyone to boast about it. His definition of a good advertisement was that ‘its public is not only strongly sold by it, but both the public and the advertiser remember it for a long time as an admirable piece of work.’

He was the first to make research part of the creative process, by bringing in Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University and paying him to measure the readership of advertisements. From this research emerged guidelines which enabled Young & Rubicam to produce advertisements which were read by more people than any other agency’s. Rubicam used to say, ‘The way we sell is to get read first.’

Like all the other giants, Rubicam was a perfectionist and had a habit of vetoing advertisements when the account executive was on his way to present them to the client. He used to say, ‘The client remembers an outstanding job years after he has forgotten that it was two months late.’

The youngest of eight children in a poor family, he left school when he was 15 and spent the next nine years bumming around the country as a shipping clerk, bellhop, chaperone of cattle, movie projectionist, door-to-door salesman, automobile salesman, and newspaper reporter (at $12 a week).

Stanley Resor

His agency was structured in the loosest possible way. He detested hierarchies. There were no department heads, and no job descriptions. The agency operated as a partnership, like a big law firm. When he offered me a job, he gave me no inkling what work he had in mind for me. Office boy? Copywriter? His successor? He did not say, and I did not ask him.

But Resor made one mistake. He stayed too long. By the time he was 80, his ideas for advertising campaigns had become anachronistic. And partners who would have made good successors retired before he did.

Albert Lasker

‘When the Kotex people came to us, the business wasn’t growing as fast as they thought it should. We didn’t have to make investigations among millions of women. Just a few of us talked to our wives and asked them if they used Kotex, and we found they didn’t, and in almost every case it was because they didn’t like to ask the druggist for it. So we developed the simple idea of putting plain wrapped packages on the dealer’s counter so that you could walk into your dealer and walk away with a wrapped package without embarrassment. The business boomed by leaps and bounds.’

7.Use typography to help readers read your copy

There is no law which says that advertisements have to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract more readers.

If you use leading (line-spacing) between paragraphs, you increase readership by an average of 12 per cent

Set key paragraphs in bold face or italic.

After two or three inches of copy, insert a cross-head, and thereafter throughout. Cross-heads keep the reader marching forward. Make some of them interrogative, to excite curiosity in the next run of copy.

A subhead of two lines, between your headline and your body copy, heightens the reader’s appetite for the feast to come.

In a recent issue of a magazine I found 47 advertisements with the copy set in reverse – white type on a black background. It is almost impossible to read.

The more outlandish the typeface, the harder it is to read. The drama belongs in what you say, not in the typeface.

Advertising agencies usually set their headlines in capital letters. This is a mistake. Professor Tinker of Stanford has established that capitals retard reading. They have no ascenders or descenders to help you recognize words, and tend to be read letter by letter.

More people read the captions under illustrations than read the body copy, so never use an illustration without putting a caption under it. Your caption should include the brand name and the promise.

Readers look first at the illustration, then at the headline, then at the copy. So put these elements in that order – illustration at the top, headline under the illustration, copy under the headline. This follows the normal order of scanning, which is from top to bottom. If you put the headline above the illustration, you are asking people to scan in an order which does not fit their habit.

Readers often skip from the headline to the coupon, to find out what your offer is. So make your coupons mini-ads, complete with brand name, promise and a miniature photograph of your product.

8.Break your superstition that people do not read long copy

All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short. I have failed only twice with long copy, once for a popular-priced cigar and once for a premium-priced whiskey.

I believe, without any research to support me, that advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not. After studying the results of advertising for retailers, Dr. Charles Edwards concluded that ‘the more facts you tell, the more you sell.’ An advertisement’s chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases.

Long copy sells more than short copy, particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money. Only amateurs use short copy.

But I must warn you that if you want your long copy to be read, you had better write it well. In particular, your first paragraph should be a grabber.

9.Ogilvy’s crash course of making the register ring with your pen

Always try to include the price of your products. You may see a necklace in a jeweler’s window, but you don’t consider buying it because the price is not shown and you are too shy to go in and ask. It is the same way with advertisements.

Testimonials increase credibility – and sales. If one testimonial tests well, try two.

Testimonials from celebrities get high recall scores, but I have stopped using them because readers remember the celebrity and forget the product. What’s more, they assume that the celebrity has been bought, which is usually the case.

Says James Webb Young, one of the best copywriters in history, ‘Every type of advertiser has the same problem: to be believed. The mail-order man knows nothing so potent for this purpose as the testimonial, yet the general advertiser seldom uses it.’

I advise you to avoid analogies. Gallup has found that they are widely misunderstood. If you are writing copy for a face cream and say, ‘Just as plants require moisture, so too does your skin’ readers don’t complete the equation. If you show a Rembrandt and say, Just as this Rembrandt portrait is a masterpiece, so too is our product,’ readers think you are selling the Rembrandt.

When copywriters argue with me about some esoteric word they want to use, I say to them, ‘Get on a bus. Go to Iowa. Stay on a farm for a week and talk to the farmer. Come back to New York by train and talk to your fellow passengers in the day-coach. If you still want to use the word, go ahead.’

It pays to write short sentences and short paragraphs, and to avoid difficult words. I once wrote that Dove made soap ‘obsolete,’ only to discover that the majority of housewives did not know what the word meant. I had to change it to ‘old-fashioned.’ When I used the word ineffable in copy for Hathaway, a reporter telephoned to ask me what it meant. I hadn’t the faintest idea. Nowadays I keep a dictionary beside my telephone.

Do not, however, address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another, second person singular.

On the average, ads with news are recalled by 22 per cent more people than ads without news.

Here are four ways to keep your prospects on the hook: ‘Limited edition’ ‘Limited supply’ ‘Last time at this price’ ‘Special price for promptness’

Cross-heads give breathing space to your copy, and make it more readable. They should be written in such a way that skimmers get the main points of your sales story.

10.As well as words, you also sell with photos

Before-and-after photographs seem to fascinate readers. In a study of 70 campaigns whose sales results were known, Gallup did not find a single before-and-after campaign that did not increase sales.

My brother Francis once asked a Cockney editor of the Daily Mirror (London) what kind of photographs most interested his readers. He answered, ‘Babies with an ’eart-throb, animals with an ’eart-throb, and what you might call sex.’ This is still true today

The kind of photographs which work hardest are those which arouse the reader’s curiosity. He glances at the photograph and says to himself, ‘What goes on here?’ Then he reads your copy to find out. Harold Rudolph called this magic element ‘Story Appeal,’ and demonstrated that the more of it you inject into your photographs, the more people look at your advertisements.

When you use a photograph of a woman, men ignore your advertisement.

Then it was found that photographs attracted more readers, were more believable, and better remembered. ( compared to paintings )

11.Where to get your big idea

Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.

It will help you recognize a big idea if you ask yourself five questions:

1 Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?

2 Do I wish I had thought of it myself?

3 Is it unique?

4 Does it fit the strategy to perfection?

5 Could it be used for 30 years?

12.Ogilvy’s definition of position

My own definition is ‘what the product does, and who it is for.’ I could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position it as a toilet bar for women with dry skin. This is still working 25 years later.

To advertise a car that looked like an orthopedic boot would have defeated me. But Bill Bernbach and his merry men positioned Volkswagen as a protest against the vulgarity of Detroit cars in those days, thereby making the Beetle a cult among those Americans who eschew conspicuous consumption.

13.People who buy Jack Daniel’s are tasting brand image, not the liquor

Why do some people chose Jack Daniel’s, while others choose Grand Dad or Taylor? Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don’t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn’t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is 90 per cent of what the distiller has to sell.

Writing advertising for any kind of liquor is an extremely subtle art. I once tried using rational facts to argue the consumer into choosing a brand of whiskey. It didn’t work. You don’t catch Coca Cola advertising that Coke contains 50 per cent more cola berries.

Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image. It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year.The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things – its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and, above all, the nature of the product itself.

14.Pricing is guesswork, and don’t presume low price sells better

It is usually assumed that marketers use scientific methods to determine the price of their products. Nothing could be further from the truth. In almost every case, the process of decision is one of guesswork.

In a study of the causes of inflation, the French Government cut thousands of cheeses in half and put them on sale. One half were marked 37 centimes, the other 56 centimes. The higher-priced cheese sold faster. Consumers judge the quality of a product by its price.

Price-off deals and other such hypodermics find favor with sales managers, but their effect is ephemeral, and they can be habit-forming. Said Bev Murphy, who invented Nielsen’s technique for measuring consumer purchases and later became President of Campbell Soup Company: ‘Sales are a function of product-value and advertising. Promotions cannot produce more than a temporary kink in the sales curve.’

15.Even Ogilvy fails every time in suggesting names for new products

I have suggested names for dozens of new products, but have not yet had one accepted. Good luck to you.

Descriptive names like 3-IN-ONE OIL, BAND-AID and JANITOR IN A DRUM. Such names start with sales appeal. But they are too specific to be used for subsequent line-extensions.

16.Learn from the direct mailing copywriters

I am convinced that if all advertisers were to follow the example of their direct response brethren, they would get more sales per dollar. Every copywriter should start his career by spending two years in direct response. One glance at any campaign tells me whether its author has ever had that experience.

One day a man walked into a London agency and asked to see the boss. He had bought a country house and was about to open it as a hotel. Could the agency help him to get customers? He had $500 to spend. Not surprisingly, the head of the agency turned him over to the office boy, who happened to be the author of this book. I invested his money in penny postcards and mailed them to well-heeled people living in the neighborhood. Six weeks later the hotel opened to a full house. I had tasted blood.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of fly-by-night frauds in the direct-mail business, including, say the New York Times, ten thousand phoney ‘pastors.’ In 1980, 1,500,000 consumers complained to the Better Business Bureau about firms which had failed to deliver the merchandise they had ordered, or had delivered it too late or in damaged condition. In the whole spectrum of marketing, direct mail is where you find the swindlers. That said, the vast bulk of advertising by direct mail is on the level.

Prospects for a new Cessna Citation business jet were surprised when we sent them live carrier pigeons, with an invitation to take a free ride in a Citation. The recipient was asked to release our carrier pigeon with his address tied to its leg. Some of the recipients ate the pigeons, but several returned alive, and at least one Citation was sold – for $600,000.

Successful mailings do not always depend on premiums, brochures and other such paraphernalia. I have seen letters produce satisfactory results all by themselves. But they have to be long letters. When Mercedes-Benz were saddled with 1,170 obsolete diesels, we mailed a five-page letter and unloaded the surplus. For Cunard we used an eight-page letter with marked success.

17.Testing is the key of direct mail

In direct mail, testing is the name of the game.

Next to the positioning of your product, the most important variables to be tested are pricing, terms of payment, premiums and the format of your mailing.

Asking for the full price and cash with the order will reduce the number of people who respond. But it may turn up more customers who are likely to stay with you over the years. Only testing will tell. The more you test, the more profitable your direct mail will become.

Once you have evolved a mailing which produces profitable results, treat it as the ‘control’ and start testing ways to beat it. Try adding a premium, or putting in an expiration date, or adding enclosures – like a personalized letter from your President. They cost money, but if they increase your profit, why worry?

18.Collect the factors which increase sales like collecting stamps, and don’t rely on your intuition

I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any; he preferred to rely on his own intuition. ‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘your gall-bladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where to find your gall-bladder, or a surgeon who relies on his intuition? Why should our clients be expected to bet millions of dollars on your intuition?’

For 35 years I have continued on the course charted by Gallup, collecting factors the way other men collect pictures and postage stamps. If you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they are found in oak forests.

When he had been head of J. Walter Thompson for 45 years, the great Stanley Resor told me, ‘Every year we spend hundreds of millions of dollars of our clients’ money. At the end of it, what do we know? Nothing. So two years ago I asked four of our people to try and identify factors which usually work. They already have twelve.’ I was too polite to tell him that I had ninety-six.

In 1947, Harold Rudolph, who had been Research Director in Stirling Getchel’s agency, published a book on the subject.2 One of his observations was that photographs with an element of ‘story appeal’ were far above average in attracting attention. This led me to put an eye-patch on the model in my advertisements for Hathaway shirts.

19.Copywriters write for sales, not for applause

Rosser Reeves: ‘Do you want fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve start moving up?’

Of 81 television classics picked by the Clio festival in previous years, 36 of the agencies involved had either lost the account or gone out of business.

There have always been noisy lunatics on the fringes of the advertising business. Their stock-in-trade includes ethnic humor, eccentric art direction, contempt for research, and their self-proclaimed genius. They are seldom found out, because they gravitate to the kind of clients who, bamboozled by their rhetoric, do not hold them responsible for sales results.

When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’

20.Don’t try to convince the customers that your products beat your competitor’s, and just tell them your features and benefits

If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that your product is better. Just say what’s good about your product – and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it.

When faced with selling ‘parity’ products, all you can hope to do is explain their virtues more persuasively than your competitors, and to differentiate them by the style of your advertising. This is the ‘added value’ which advertising contributes, and I am not sufficiently puritanical to hate myself for it.

21.Don’t reinvent advertising again and again and again, there are formulae

I never cease to be struck by the consistency of consumer reactions to different kinds of headline, illustration, layout and copy – year after year, country after country.

The other day I read a cri de cœur from a senior executive in a food company: ‘TV is so devouring a medium that you need to comb the agencies to find the old sweat who knows how to put together half-way decent print advertisements for food. The others invent food advertising all over again, without knowing which way is up. The silly thing is that there are just about infallible formulae for constructing advertisements which grab a woman’s attention and don’t let go of it until the message has been fully planted. Once these formulae are understood, even junior brand managers can assemble the makings of a hard-working food advertisement, while the bright ones will have women tearing out your ads and shoving them into kitchen drawers in a way you wouldn’t believe. Try telling this to agencies. They’ve never heard of the fundamentals of food advertising. Mention formulae to them and their frail creative souls shrivel.’

22.You can go on running a effective campaign until it wear out

You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to couples who got married last year will probably be just as successful with couples who get married this year. A good advertisement can be thought of as a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping.

The best way to settle such arguments is to measure the selling effectiveness of your campaign at regular intervals, and to go on running it until the research shows that it has worn out.

23.Most campaigns fails due to complication

Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing.

24.Are you really busy writing your copy, or busy pretending to be busy

If a copywriter averages an hour a week actually writing, he is exceptional.

25.Try to satisfy every executive will gain you every thing but great copy

In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create.

26.Ogilvy’s crash course of marketing

Most marketers spend too much time worrying about how to revive products which are in trouble, and too little time worrying about how to make successful products even more successful. It is the mark of a brave man to admit defeat, cut his loss, and move on.

It has become prohibitively expensive to launch brands aimed at a dominant share-of-market. Even the manufacturers with the biggest war-chests are finding it more profitable to aim their new brands at narrowly defined segments of the market.

It helps if the point of difference goes hand-in-hand with a chord of familiarity that links the new product to the consumer’s past experience – a disposable diaper, a light beer, a diet cola, a paper towel.

A.S.C. Ehrenberg of the London Business School has established that consumers do not buy one brand of soap, or coffee, or detergent. They have a repertory of four or five brands, and move from one to another. They almost never buy a brand which has not been admitted to their repertory during its first year on the market. Dr. Ehrenberg goes on to argue that the only thing you can expect from post-launch advertising is that it will persuade present users to buy your brand more often than the others in their repertory.

About 35 per cent of supermarket sales come from products which did not exist ten years ago. You can judge the vitality of a company by the number of new products it brings to market.

Watch the media your competitors use, in particular the media they continue to use.

27.Other highlights unsorted

If you follow the advice I have given you, you will do your homework, avoid committees, learn from research, watch what the direct-response advertisers do, and stay away from irrelevant sex.

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.

But I am now so old that a French magazine lists me as the only survivor among a group of men who, they aver, contributed to the Industrial Revolution – alongside Adam Smith, Edison, Karl Marx, Rockefeller, Ford and Keynes. Does old age disqualify me from writing about advertising in today’s world? Or could it be that perspective helps a man to separate the eternal verities of advertising from its passing fads?

My experience suggests that when agencies sign their ads, they produce better ones. When Reader’s Digest asked me to write an advertisement for their magazine (see this page), they specified that I had to sign it. Golly, did I work hard on that ad. Everyone was going to know who wrote it.

Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. ‘Standing room only’ creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure.

On a train journey to California, a friend asked Mr. Wrigley why, with the lion’s share of the market, he continued to advertise his chewing gum. ‘How fast do you think this train is going?’ asked Wrigley. ‘I would say about ninety miles an hour’ ‘Well,’ said Wrigley, ‘do you suggest we unhitch the engine?’

Most young men in big corporations behave as if profit were not a function of time. When Jerry Lambert scored his breakthrough with Listerine, he speeded up the whole process of marketing by dividing time into months. He reviewed progress every 30 days, with the result that he made a fortune in record time.

Thirty-two per cent of beer-drinkers drink 80 per cent of all beer. Twenty-three per cent of laxative users consume 80 per cent of all laxatives. Fourteen per cent of the people who drink gin consume 80 per cent of all the gin.

Advertising reflects the mores of society, but does not influence them. Thus it is that you find more explicit sex in magazines and novels than in advertisements. The word fuck is commonplace in contemporary literature, but has yet to appear in advertisements.