Research library Required reading Copy that sells
Advertising Is Information. Research Is How You Read It.
David Ogilvy built one of the great agencies on two convictions: an ad exists to sell, and you find out what sells by research, not by taste. Ogilvy on Advertising is his late-career summary of both.
David Ogilvy · Ogilvy on Advertising · 1983
What it is
Ogilvy’s own guide to the business, published in 1983, more than thirty years after he started the agency that became Ogilvy & Mather. It covers how to write, how to judge an agency, and what research had taught him, in his usual plain and opinionated style. Its stance is set on the first pages:
“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.” p. 7
What we took from it
Taste is not evidence. Before he started his agency, Ogilvy worked for George Gallup’s research institute, and the book keeps returning to what had been measured: which headlines get read, which layouts work, what makes people buy. His chapter on research, “18 Miracles of Research,” has a line we’ve always liked:
“Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.” Chapter 15, “18 Miracles of Research”
Where it shows up in our work
Ogilvy’s research answered the question his clients paid for: which ad sells more. Ours adds the question he couldn’t easily measure in 1983: which customers did it sell to, and what were they worth afterwards. The signals are still there to be decoded. Most of them now live in the CRM and the finance system instead of a readership study.
Next on the shelf Joseph Sugarman, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook