David Ogilvy quotes Country: united_kingdom

• The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace. (David Ogilvy) [advertising/product/advertising/willpower]
• If each of us hires people smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. (David Ogilvy) [people/company/dwarfs]
• I always said that mega-mergers were for megalomaniacs. (David Ogilvy)
• What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it. (David Ogilvy) [advertising/more]
• The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years. (David Ogilvy) [life/age]
• A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. (David Ogilvy)
• Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. (David Ogilvy)
• Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things. (David Ogilvy)
• Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals. (David Ogilvy)
• Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them. (David Ogilvy)
• Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous. (David Ogilvy)
• Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga. (David Ogilvy)
• Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible. (David Ogilvy)
• Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals. (David Ogilvy)
• Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image. (David Ogilvy)
• First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it. (David Ogilvy)
• Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You've got to believe in the product. (David Ogilvy)
• Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine. (David Ogilvy)
• I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes. (David Ogilvy)
• I did not feel 'evil' when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years. (David Ogilvy)
• I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. (David Ogilvy)
• I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular. (David Ogilvy)
• I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive. (David Ogilvy)
• I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination. (David Ogilvy)
• If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. (David Ogilvy)
• If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative. (David Ogilvy)
• If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising. (David Ogilvy)
• In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. (David Ogilvy)
• It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy. (David Ogilvy)
• It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye. (David Ogilvy)
• It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. (David Ogilvy)

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