23 Lessons from David Ogilvy

Hi Zenith Catcher,

I thought this was worth sharing.

David Ogilvy is often called the father of advertising. He built one of the most successful ad agencies in the world, and his ideas about persuasion, writing, and creativity still hold up today.

Here are 23 of his best lessons (found this on X, props to The Ad Professor)

1. Search all the parks in all your cities; you’ll find no statues of committees.
2. The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
3. You are advertising to a moving parade, not a standing army.
4. Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone.
5. Remember you are a human being writing to another human being. Neither of you is an institution.
6. Tell your prospective client your weakness before they notice them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.
7. Avoiding excess in all things is a recipe for dullness and mediocrity.
8. A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
9. There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50% more readers.
10. 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.
11. People who think well, write well.
12. The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is ‘test’.
13. On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.
14. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
15. Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating.
16. Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.
17. Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
18. Raise your sights. Blaze new trails. Compete with the immortals.
19. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft.
20. If you’re trying to persuade people to buy something, use the language in which they think.
21. Insist that due dates are kept even if it means working all night. Hard work never killed a man. People die of boredom.
22. If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling.
23. At the start of your career in advertising, what you learn is more important than what you earn.

Much love,

Nicola

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