5 ideas
On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy, so once you have written your headline you have spent eighty cents of your advertising dollar. Headlines that promise a benefit or contain news draw far more readers than clever, vague, or wordless ones, and including the brand name in the headline ensures the 80 percent who skip the body still learn who is advertising.
Direct-response advertisers measure exactly which appeals, formats, and offers produce sales, so every element should be tested in small markets before committing large budgets. The mechanism is to treat each ad as an experiment with a measurable result rather than an act of self-expression, letting coupon returns and sales figures—not opinion or awards—decide what runs.
Every advertisement contributes to the complex symbol that is the brand's personality, and consistency over years builds a coherent image that commands market share and price premiums. Manufacturers who dedicate their advertising to building the most favorable image win the largest share, while those who chase short-term tactical variety dilute the accumulated impression in the consumer's mind.
If each manager hires people smaller than himself, the company becomes a company of dwarfs. If each hires people bigger than himself, it becomes a company of giants. Ogilvy made the point by giving new office heads a set of Russian nesting dolls that carried this message.
Direct-response advertisers know to the penny which ads sell, because every coupon and order is counted. So their habits, such as long factual copy, specific offers and news-style headlines, are evidence of what actually works. Image advertisers who never measure sales tend to keep practices that only win awards.