On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
David Ogilvy
On the average
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What David Ogilvy doesn’t say (at least in this quote) is that the people who only read the headline generally stop there because they are not interested. Only those who want to know more go on to the body copy.
If you were to very carefully analyse the behaviour of those who only read the headline, you would find that most of them were never part of your target market to begin with. A bad headline may fail to attract the attention of people who might want to buy the product. A confusing headline may attract the attention of those who care nothing for the product, thus wasting their time and annoying them. But even the best headline is only a first-pass filter. It doesn’t make the sale; it only helps to sort the prospective customers from the non-customers. And that is not eighty percent of the work.