I came across this old advertising post I wrote and am blown away by how much truer these quotes are today. Perhaps I am just getting wiser as I age.
Writing Killer ads is a rare skill that few bother to fully master.
These advertising legends can probably take credit for selling more product and creating more wealth than anyone else in the world.
Folks like David Ogilvy are worth studying at length, and if you consider how much effort they put into choosing their words, a whole new world will open up for you.
My personal favorites are Number 6 and Number 8… Which ones do you like the best? (Reading these again, in 2022, I find that my tastes have changed. Number 7 is my new favorite.
1. “On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.” – David Ogilvy
2. “It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money…” – David Ogilvy
3. “I’ve learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.” – Leo Burnett
4. “A copywriter should have ‘an understanding of people, an insight into them, a sympathy toward them.” – George Gribbin
5. “An ad is finished only when you no longer can find a single element to remove.” – Robert Fleege
6. “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you’re doing, but nobody else does.” – Steuart Henderson Britt
7. “I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.” – Philip Dusenberry
8 . “The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.”
– Thomas Jefferson
9. “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” – Howard Gossage
10. “The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.” – Leo Burnett
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“On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy,” and “It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money…” are my favourites, the ones by David Ogilvy. Writing a good ad is important in business, but he is spot on with the importance of the title. People skim through things – I’m guilt of doing it – but the thing they most likely read in full out of everything is the title, to either cement something as interesting or something that can be dismissed and ignored. Wonderful collection of quotes there. They really are the golden rules.