Learning from Ogilvy

This piece from Copyblogger on David Ogilvy reminds us that his advertising principles are equally applicable to the current shift from traditional advertising towards social media marketing (particularly blogging and on-line communities):

“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.”

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

“I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”

“I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.”

“Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.”

“The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.”

“What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.”

“A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.”
“Nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else’s advertising.”

That’s still bang on the money…