David Ogilvy's Best Advertising Campaigns
To get clients, do good advertising.
- David Ogilvy
Perhaps more than any other agency, Ogilvy & Mather has been built on a set of clearly defined principles reflecting the views of its founder. David defined these principles early in his career and never wavered from them. He has always believed that the function of advertising is to sell and that it is possible to determine the techniques by which sales are most likely to be produced.
In 1936, at the age of 25, he declared that "Every advertisement must tell the whole sales story ... every word in the copy must count," adding that "permanent success has rarely been built by frivolity and people do not buy from clowns." In a speech to the Association of National Advertisers (U.S.) in 1992, he was still sounding the same theme: "If you focus your advertising budget on entertaining the consumer, you may not sell as much of your product as you like. People don't buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television last night. They buy it because it promises a benefit."
Despite the austerity of his doctrine, David as a copywriter is personally responsible for many of advertising's most famously sophisticated campaigns. These include: The Man in the Hathaway Shirt, the series of advertisements for Schweppes featuring Commander Whitehead, and perhaps the best known headline ever written for an automobile ad: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock."
- Hathaway Shirts
- Puerto Rico
- Sears
- Schweppes
- Shell Oil
- Steuben Glass
- Dove soap
- Rolls-Royce
- Mercedes-Benz
- Guinness