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23 lessons from David Ogilvy:

1. Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees.

2. The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

3. You are advertising to a moving parade, not a standing army.

4. Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone.

5. Remember you are a human being writing to another human being. Neither of you is an institution

6. Tell your prospective client your weakness before they notice them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.

7. Avoiding excess in all things is a recipe for dullness and mediocrity.

8. A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

9. There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50% more readers

10. Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well-informed, or your idea will be irrelevant

11. People who think well, write well

12. The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is 'test'.

13. On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.

14. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

15. Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating

16. Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

17. Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

18. Raise your sights. Blaze new trails. Compete with the immortals.

19. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft.

20. If you're trying to persuade people to buy something, use the language in which they think.

21. Insist that due dates are kept even if it means working all night. Hard work never killed a man. People die of boredom

22. If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling.

23. At the start of your career in advertising, what you learn is more important than what you earn.

Bonus one:

“When Fortune published an article about me and titled it: 'Is David Ogilvy a Genius?', I asked my lawyer to sue the editor for the question mark.” - David Ogilvy

More than 40 years of experience as a software engineer tells me your rant is seriously wrong, and the classic advice was correct. It didn't give you permission to "leave things comically inefficient", it warned you that if you try to achieve speed before correctness you will land yourself in a world of hurt.

The correct sequence is: first make it run, next make it correct, and only after that worry about making it fast.

One pragmatic reason to do it that way is because your intuitions about where the performance problems will be are often incorrect. So: make it work, make it correct, run a profiler to find out where it's actually slow rather than where you thought it was going to be slow, and then make it go fast.

Sunday rant.

For software engineering, my sense is that the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil” has massively backfired. Its from a book on data structures and mainly tried to dissuade people from prematurely write things in assembler. But the point was to free you up to think harder about the data structures to use, not leave things comically inefficient. This context is always skipped when it’s uttered.

Not all fast software is world-class, but all world-class software is fast. Performance is the killer feature.

If you are in engineering, here is a fantastic anecdote. I refer to this account often. It’s a bit subtile, but the implications are massive-

It’s an account of how SQLite became 50% faster, not by doing one specific thing but hundreds of small ones.

SQLite is everywhere today because of this work.

sqlite-users.sqlite.narkive.com/CVRvSKBs/50-fa…

We need the engineers in all companies fight for this more. Product leads are not the right owners of the end performance of the software. This needs to be encoded in the professional pride of the software engineering discipline. Leaders in companies need to encourage it and hold engineering accountable. It’s simply not ok to fritter away the performance of the products for random reasons.

Every user of your products cares exactly as much about latency as engineers do when typing in their terminal. They just don’t have the words to describe what they don’t like about the experience and neither should they.