BOOK REVIEW - Ogilvy On Advertising
Ogilvy on Advertising is a practical guide to advertising by the founder of an international advertising company, showing how to create advertising that works, how to run an agency, how to write successful copy, and what the future holds for the advertising industry.
Source: Back cover
Our Review
Today the book for you is Ogilvy on Advertising.
And if you’ve never heard of Ogilvy, he is probably the master of direct response advertising. David Ogilvy had an ultra-successful advertising agency, Ogilvy and Mather in America, in New York, and has literally become one of the proponents of direct copywriting. Some of his adverts you will know as being very mainstream. What I really love about this book is it takes adverts and breaks them down in terms of why he wrote them, the techniques he was using, what he was trying to bring across to help write better copy.
Now one of the ones I really love is the one about the Rolls-Royce here, and you can see, “Should every corporation by its president a Rolls-Royce?” Really good. They are just sort of dated now because they were written in the ’70s, ’80s, somewhere before that, but incredibly transferable in today’s market.
So as I say, what I really love about it is there’s some really great stuff, some nice pictures in there, examples of ads that you can use for yourself. Definitely something I would highly recommend. It’s one of the best copywriting advertising books I’ve ever read in a number of years. And anything, again, you can get by David Ogilvy, I highly recommend that you get your hands on it and consume the content, make notes, and use what he recommends in your advertising copy.
Key Points
- Great examples
- Timeless classic
- Understand what works and why in ads
