A well-run restaurant is like a winning baseball team. It makes the most of every crew member’s talent and takes advantage of every split-second opportunity to speed up service.
Every ad is an investment in the long-term image of a brand.
On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.
Never write more than two pages on any subject.
If you can’t advertise yourself, what hope do you have of advertising anything else?
There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don’t destroy them. They lay golden eggs.
Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don’t think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.
You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.
You cannot bore people into buying your product – you can only interest them in buying it.
David Ogilvy made his copywriters come up 100 different headlines for every ad they wrote.
What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.
The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.
Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.
The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.
The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.
The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything.
Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.