Chapter 4
The Art of Persuasive Communication: Headlines, Copy, and Visuals
The headline is the most crucial element of print advertising. On average, five times as many people read headlines as body copy, meaning without a strong headline, you've wasted 90% of your money. Headlines that promise benefits work best, as do those containing news. When you have news, state it clearly using powerful words like "amazing" and "introducing."
Always include the brand name in your headline, or 80% of readers will never know what you're advertising. Headlines in quotes increase recall by 28%, and including local city names in newspaper ads improves results. Avoid tricky headlines with puns or double meanings-your headline must telegraph your message clearly to compete with hundreds of others.
For illustrations, Ogilvy advocates photographs over drawings-they attract more readers, are more believable, and better remembered. Show the end-result of using your product; before-and-after photos fascinate readers and increase sales. Keep illustrations simple with focus on one person, and avoid human faces enlarged beyond life size.
Regarding copy length, Ogilvy challenges conventional wisdom: "The more facts you tell, the more you sell." Experience shows that for most products, long copy sells better than short. Louis Engel's 6,450-word ad for Merrill Lynch pulled 10,000 responses from one insertion in the New York Times. Claude Hopkins wrote five pages of text for Schlitz beer, moving them from fifth to first in sales. Long copy conveys the impression you have something important to say, whether people read it all or not.
When writing copy, address readers as individuals, not a crowd. Write as if sending a personal letter-one human being to another. Queen Victoria complained that Gladstone spoke to her as if addressing a public meeting, while she preferred Disraeli who spoke to her like a human being. Use everyday conversational language, avoid difficult words, and tell readers specifically what your product will do for them.
Chapter 5
Television Advertising: What Actually Sells
Television commercials face unique challenges in capturing attention and driving action in an increasingly distracted world. Through extensive research and testing, Ogilvy identifies ten types of commercials that consistently prove above average in changing brand preference and driving sales:
1. Humor can sell effectively, contradicting Claude Hopkins' famous assertion that "people don't buy from clowns." Successful examples include Federal Express's fast-talking executive and M&M's anthropomorphized candies. However, the humor must relate directly to the product benefit rather than existing merely for entertainment.
2. Slice of life playlets showing realistic conversations where one person convinces another about a product's merits consistently deliver results. While creative teams often dismiss them as cliche, these scenarios resonate because viewers see themselves in familiar situations. Procter & Gamble has used this format successfully for decades with products like Tide and Dawn.
3. Testimonials work best when capturing genuine, unscripted moments of loyal users defending products when they don't know they're being filmed. The more natural and imperfect the delivery, the more credible it appears. Amateur-looking footage often outperforms polished productions in building trust.
4. Demonstrations showing products performing impressively persuade viewers effectively. International Paper spanning a canyon with a paperboard bridge dramatically proved strength. Similarly, Timex watches surviving torture tests and Samsonite luggage withstanding gorilla handling created memorable proof of durability.
5. Problem-solution formats resonate by showing a familiar frustration and how your product resolves it. These work particularly well for household products, medications, and convenience items that address common pain points. OxiClean's before-and-after stain removal demonstrations exemplify this approach.
6. Talking heads, while considered uncreative by agencies, work especially well for new products requiring explanation. Direct, straightforward presentation of features and benefits helps viewers understand novel offerings. This format proved crucial in introducing revolutionary products like the first microwave ovens.
7. Characters used consistently as living symbols of products build recognition and preference over time. Tony the Tiger, the Marlboro Man, and Mr. Whipple became valuable brand assets through years of repeated exposure. Their familiar presence creates comfort and trust.
8. Reason-why approaches presenting rational arguments for purchase perform slightly above average, particularly for considered purchases. This works well for cars, appliances, and financial services where logical benefits matter.
9. News about products consistently performs above average, even for established products when advertising new uses or improvements. Dawn dish soap successfully expanded its market by promoting its use in wildlife rescue operations.
10. Emotional appeals leveraging nostalgia, charm, and sentimentality can be remarkably effective when products lack unique functional benefits. Coca-Cola's holiday advertisements and Google's "Dear Sophie" campaign demonstrate how emotional storytelling builds brand affinity.
Ogilvy warns against three consistently underperforming approaches: celebrity testimonials (viewers remember the star but forget the product), cartoons (less persuasive with adult audiences), and musical vignettes (entertaining but ineffective at driving sales).
For practical execution, Ogilvy provides sixteen essential guidelines:
• Feature the brand name within the first ten seconds
• Show the package clearly and repeatedly
• Use close-ups when your product is the hero
• Grab attention in the opening frame
• Avoid unnecessary jingles that distract from the message
• Reinforce key promises with on-screen text
• Show the product in actual use
• Maintain consistent brand voice across campaigns
• Keep the message focused on one key benefit
• Use sound strategically to enhance retention
• Demonstrate rather than just tell whenever possible
• End with a clear call to action
• Ensure adequate exposure time for important information
• Test different versions with sample audiences
• Consider cultural differences for international markets
• Plan for viewing on multiple screen sizes
Research shows that 19-40% of viewers misunderstand even well-crafted commercials, making crystal-clear communication paramount. Every element must work together to deliver an unmistakable message about the product's core benefit.
Chapter 6
Building a Successful Advertising Agency: Leadership and Talent
Running an agency requires exceptional leadership qualities: midnight oil, salesmanship, a deep keel, guts, thrust, and genius for sustaining morale among people working in continuous anxiety. Everyone in advertising lives with fear-copywriters worry about having big ideas, account executives are caught between agency and client responsibilities, and agency heads worry about losing clients or valuable partners. This constant pressure cooker environment demands leaders who can maintain composure while inspiring their teams to produce breakthrough work.
Ogilvy advises: "Make it fun to work in your agency-kill grimness with laughter, encourage exuberance, and get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom." Successful agency leaders are typically enthusiasts who can rally teams around ambitious projects, intellectually honest in their assessment of work, gutsy when facing tough decisions like firing underperforming employees or challenging client requests, resilient in bouncing back from lost pitches and setbacks, charming rather than bullying in their management style, and good listeners who can absorb feedback from both clients and staff. They must also possess the rare ability to balance creative excellence with business acumen.
The most difficult people to find are good copywriters-they typically have well-furnished minds from diverse reading and experiences, exceptional curiosity about human nature and consumer behavior, above-average humor that connects with audiences, and fanatical interest in advertising that drives them to study successful campaigns. The tragedy of advertising is that the best practitioners are always promoted into management, where they become less useful to clients than when writing copy. This creates a perpetual challenge of maintaining creative excellence while developing future leaders.
When building your team, Ogilvy warns against five critical hiring mistakes based on hard-learned experience: never hire your friends (he made this mistake three times and had to fire all three, damaging both the business and friendships), never hire your client's children (which creates impossible expectations and conflicts), never hire your own children or your partners' children (nepotism breeds resentment), think twice before hiring people successful in other fields (advertising requires unique skills that don't always transfer), and never hire your clients (which compromises objectivity and professional relationships).
To maintain discipline, successful agencies insist people arrive on time (tardiness signals disrespect for colleagues), telephones are answered promptly (every interaction matters), and client secrets remain absolutely secure (trust is paramount in the industry). Sustain unremitting pressure on professional standards-it's suicide to settle for second-rate performance in a business where your work is publicly judged. Above all, insist due dates are kept, even if it means working all night. Hard work never killed anyone, and occasional all-night pushes actually enliven morale-provided leadership is in the trenches alongside the team. These intense periods often produce both breakthrough work and stronger team bonds, but leaders must ensure they remain occasional rather than becoming the norm.
Chapter 7
Winning and Keeping Clients: The Business of Advertising
Ogilvy built a remarkable record as a new business collector, employing a methodical approach to targeting and winning prestigious accounts. He started with an ambitious target list of clients he most wanted: General Foods, Lever Brothers, Bristol Myers, Campbell Soup Company, and Shell. Through persistence and proven results, he eventually secured them all, plus an impressive roster including American Express, Sears Roebuck, IBM, Morgan Guaranty, Merrill Lynch, and three governments-building billings that totaled more than three billion dollars. His success stemmed from a clear understanding of both client needs and his agency's capabilities.
His policy strictly followed J.P. Morgan's philosophy of handling "only first-class business, and that in a first-class way"-though pragmatism ruled in the early days when any paying client helped keep the lights on. For new business presentations, Ogilvy developed specific strategies that proved highly effective. He advocated mixing client and agency personnel rather than having them sit in opposing teams, creating a more collaborative atmosphere. While thorough preparation was essential, he insisted on speaking naturally rather than from prepared text, allowing for authentic dialogue. Most crucially, he emphasized the importance of listening carefully to determine if the client would be a good fit for the agency. His revolutionary approach included preemptively addressing potential weaknesses before clients could spot them, and avoiding the common pitfall of overwhelming prospects with excessive case histories or research statistics.
For maintaining client relationships, Ogilvy developed several groundbreaking principles. He approached compensation discussions with particular dignity, insisting that agencies should never haggle over fees, just as professionals like lawyers or accountants wouldn't. To protect both parties' interests, he innovatively suggested that clients demand five-year contracts, providing security against competitors attempting to poach agencies with larger budgets. This longer-term view helped build deeper, more stable client relationships.
The industry convention preventing agencies from serving competing clients created numerous challenges. Some clients expanded their definition of "conflict" to include any product that might indirectly affect their sales, from distant substitutes to complementary goods. Ogilvy found support for his more nuanced view from Marvin Bower of McKinsey, who argued that even if information were exchanged between competing clients (which professional agencies systematically prevent), competing companies typically have such different organizational cultures, histories, philosophies, and procedures that meaningful competitive advantage would be minimal.
Regarding agency size, Ogilvy's experience revealed important insights about scale in advertising. While he found his firm more personally satisfying when small, expansion became necessary to properly service major accounts requiring global reach and extensive resources. However, he maintained that small agencies weren't endangered species - the market would always have more small accounts than large ones, and within their scope, boutique agencies often outperformed larger ones in terms of creativity and personal service. He firmly believed that creative excellence wasn't a function of agency size but rather of talent and culture. This observation has proven prescient as the industry has evolved to include successful agencies of all sizes.
Chapter 8
Direct Mail and Response Advertising: The Ultimate Accountability
Direct mail holds a special place in Ogilvy's heart as his "first love and secret weapon," representing the purest form of measurable advertising. Unlike traditional advertising methods, direct mail advertisers can measure results down to the penny, making it the perfect laboratory for testing marketing strategies. Every element can be methodically tested: pricing structures, payment terms, promotional premiums, envelope designs, and mailing formats. The data speaks volumes - a prominent magazine's testing revealed that offering 29 issues for $29.95 generated 35% more revenue than higher-priced options despite being 40% cheaper, demonstrating how critical price point testing can be.
Creative innovations, when properly tested, can yield remarkable results in direct mail campaigns. Ogilvy's team demonstrated this through several memorable campaigns. They sent live carrier pigeons to Cessna Citation jet prospects, resulting in at least one $600,000 sale - a testament to the power of unusual approaches. His brother Francis took creativity further by writing letters in Greek and Latin to school headmasters, successfully selling cooking stoves by appealing to their intellectual sensibilities. The length of communications proved crucial - they sold 1,170 obsolete Mercedes diesels using a detailed five-page letter, while Cunard's successful campaign employed an eight-page letter that told a compelling story about luxury travel.
For print advertisements designed to generate direct orders, headlines reign supreme in importance. Testing has shown that one headline can generate five times the orders of another with identical body copy. The conventional wisdom about brevity doesn't apply here - long copy consistently outperforms short copy, particularly for high-ticket items. This is especially true for products requiring significant investment or explanation. Professional copywriters understand that comprehensive information builds confidence and overcomes objections. Cross-heads serve as navigational aids, making lengthy text more digestible and allowing skimmers to grasp key points quickly. Testimonials significantly boost credibility and sales, but with an important caveat - celebrity endorsements should only be used when the celebrity has genuine authority in the relevant field.
Television has emerged as a powerful medium for generating direct response through mail and telephone orders. The most effective commercials share common elements: clear demonstration of problem-solving capabilities, strong guarantees, transparent pricing, and direct calls to action. The data shows that commercials under two minutes rarely generate profitable sales volumes - longer formats are needed to build desire and overcome skepticism. Order information must be presented clearly, with at least 20 seconds dedicated to providing ordering details and toll-free numbers repeated minimum twice. Perhaps most surprisingly, commercials aired during less engaging programs consistently outperform those during popular shows - viewers watching old movies or routine programming are 40% more likely to respond than those absorbed in high-drama shows like Dallas. This counter-intuitive finding has significant implications for media buying strategies in direct response advertising.
Chapter 9
Marketing Wisdom: Practical Insights for Brand Success
Despite winning the Parlin Award for Marketing, Ogilvy finds academic marketing literature incomprehensible. However, thirty years working with marketing practitioners taught him valuable lessons.
About 35% of supermarket sales come from products that didn't exist a decade ago. A company's vitality can be judged by its new product introductions. The most successful new products combine a point of difference with a "chord of familiarity" linking to consumers' past experiences.
Finding an unregistered product name is extremely difficult. Three types exist: names of people (like FORD), which are memorable and suggest human invention; meaningless names (like KODAK), which require significant investment to build recognition; and descriptive names (like 3-IN-ONE OIL), which start with sales appeal but limit line extensions.
Some products that sell well without advertising may perform even better with it. Listerine sold modestly for 40 years until Jerry Lambert advertised it as a remedy for halitosis, sending sales through the roof. Similarly, Hershey built the world's largest confectionery business without advertising, but after testing showed significant sales increases with advertising, they eventually invested $42 million in advertising by 1980.
Marketers spend too much time trying to revive troubled products and too little making successful ones more successful. It takes courage to admit defeat, cut losses, and move on. Concentrate time, brains, and advertising money on successes-back winners and abandon losers.
Cutting advertising during recession is dangerous-studies of six recessions show companies maintaining advertising budgets achieve greater profit increases than those cutting back. Stopping advertising for a brand in its introductory phase will likely kill it forever. Ogilvy regards advertising as part of the product-a production cost, not a selling cost-that shouldn't be reduced during hard times.
A small percentage of consumers account for most product consumption: 32% of beer-drinkers consume 80% of all beer; 23% of laxative users consume 80% of laxatives; 14% of gin drinkers consume 80% of gin. Keep your eye on these heavy users, as their motivations differ from occasional users.
Chapter 10
The Future of Advertising: Predictions and Principles
In his final chapters, Ogilvy addresses persistent criticisms of advertising and offers predictions for its future. He defends the profession against charges of manipulation, noting that legal regulations make deception virtually impossible-with one exception: the "totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest" television commercials for presidential candidates.
Ogilvy condemns billboards, citing statistics that highways with billboards have three times as many accidents as those without. Despite representing less than 2% of total advertising, the billboard industry has successfully fought regulation, even claiming that "there are times when most people would rather look at posters than scenery."
He laments the lack of factual information in advertising, using his car-buying experience as an example. Despite reading car ads for six months, he found only "fatuous slogans and flatulent generalities" rather than useful facts. He contrasts this with his own fact-based advertising for Rolls-Royce and his partner's for Mercedes, which dramatically increased sales on small budgets.
Looking ahead, Ogilvy predicts thirteen changes: improved research will generate better knowledge of what works; print advertising will experience a renaissance; ads will contain more information and less hype; billboards will be abolished; television and radio commercial clutter will be controlled; governments will increase advertising for educational purposes; advertising will help control population growth; political candidates will stop using dishonest advertising; overseas advertising quality will improve rapidly; foreign agencies will successfully enter the US market; multinational brands will increase market share with headquarters-directed but locally-adapted campaigns; direct-response advertising will be integrated into general agencies; and more cost-effective television commercial production methods will emerge.
Throughout his book, Ogilvy returns to his central philosophy: effective advertising isn't about winning awards or creating entertainment-it's about selling products. As he puts it in his characteristically direct manner: "When I write an ad, I want you to buy the product, not admire its creativity." This unwavering focus on results rather than recognition remains his most enduring lesson for advertisers today.
