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.
Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote compares the creation of advertising campaigns to the birth of a baby, highlighting the creativity and care involved in both processes.
David Ogilvy, a renowned advertising executive, uses this metaphor to express the intricate and nurturing process of developing advertising campaigns. Just as a midwife plays a crucial role in the birth of a new life, an advertising professional brings new ideas to fruition, emphasizing the creativity and effort involved in creating effective advertisements that resonate with the audience.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a presentation about the importance of creativity in marketing, this quote can illustrate the nurturing aspect of campaign development.
More from David Ogilvy
All quotes βOur business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.
Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.
Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.
The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
Experience has taught me that advertisers get the best results when they pay their agency a flat fee. It is unrealistic to expect your agency to be impartial when its vested interest lies wholly in the direction of increasing your commissionable advertising.
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He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.
Movies may be as close to a document of our national culture as there is; they're supposed to represent what we believe ourselves to be. So when you don't see yourself at all - or see yourself erased - that hurts.
My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.
A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.