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Audiobook Summary and Review by StoryShots
If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.
Most advertising people want applause.
David Ogilvy wanted your wallet.
In Ogilvy on Advertising, the man behind the Rolls-Royce and Hathaway campaigns treats an ad as a sales tool, not a stage, and shows how research, headlines, and honesty separate ads that work from ads that merely impress.
A copywriter once told a veteran he preferred to trust his intuition over reading about advertising.
The reply: you wouldn't choose a surgeon who relied on instinct instead of anatomy.
Nobody has a tinker's chance of producing successful advertising without doing homework first.
The homework has three parts.
Study the product, because the more you know about it, the likelier you are to find a big idea.
Study what competitors have tried and how it worked.
Then study consumers: the language they use, what they care about, and which promise would make them buy.
Most pitches skip that last part.
They start from what the advertiser wants to say.
Big ideas arrive from the unconscious, but only a well-fed one delivers.
The research gives your intuition something to work with.
You still have to decide what the ad will actually promise, and that decision is where most campaigns quietly fail.
One sentence deserves rereading: advertising that promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet most campaigns contain no promise at all.
Consumers buy products whose ads promise value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, or social status.
That promise lives in the headline.
On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy, so once you've written it, you have spent eighty cents of your dollar.
It competes with hundreds of others in a newspaper, so it should telegraph what you want to say.
Skip the puns and state the benefit.
Then back it with facts.
The consumer isn't a moron.
She is your wife, and she wants every piece of information you can give her.
Helpful information gets read by 75 percent more people than copy that deals only with the product.
Adjectives flatter the advertiser.
Facts convince the buyer.
A strong promise still leaves a harder problem.
You have to know it will work before you spend a fortune running it.
A career that began in research at Gallup shaped everything here.
The faith is in tests, not committees or taste.
Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly, and finally by a test campaign, not by arguments around a table.
The favorite method is simple.
Write two ads with different promises in the headline, offer a free sample at the end, and run each in half the circulation.
The headline that draws more requests wins.
It measures real behavior, because people don't always say what they think or do what they say.
Then comes the discipline most people lack.
Concentrate your time, brains, and money on your successes.
Back your winners and abandon your losers.
Any fool can write a bad advertisement, but it takes a genius to keep his hands off a good one.
Boredom with your own winning ad is not a reason to retire it.
An ad that works should run until the data says otherwise, even if everyone in the room is tired of it.
Put together, this summary of Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy reads as one argument: study the product, promise a real benefit, and let tests decide.
Left untold are the five questions for spotting a big idea, why long copy beats short, and what Rolls-Royce and Hathaway taught the agency.
For the full summary of Ogilvy on Advertising, head to the StoryShots app.
