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Quotes by David M. Ogilvy

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
– David M. Ogilvy
A well-run restaurant is like a winning baseball team. It makes the most of every crew member's talent and takes advantage of every split-second opportunity to speed up service.
– David M. 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 M. Ogilvy
Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.
– David M. Ogilvy
Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
– David M. Ogilvy
Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.
– David M. 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 M. Ogilvy
Claude Hopkins... maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock.
– David M. Ogilvy
Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.
– David M. Ogilvy
Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.
– David M. Ogilvy
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.
– David M. Ogilvy
Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it's Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniel's. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images.
– David M. 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 M. 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 M. Ogilvy
I always said that mega-mergers were for megalomaniacs.
– David M. Ogilvy
I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good manners.
– David M. 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 M. 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 M. Ogilvy
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.
– David M. 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 M. 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 M. Ogilvy
I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product.
– David M. Ogilvy
I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I have a previous engagement with another client; successful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach.
– David M. 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 M. Ogilvy
I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I didn't know what it meant myself.
– David M. 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 M. Ogilvy
If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.
– David M. 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 M. Ogilvy
If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out - either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time.
– David M. Ogilvy
It has taken more than a hundred scientists two years to find out how to make the product in question; I have been given thirty days to create its personality and plan its launching. If I do my job well, I shall contribute as much as the hundred scientists to the success of this product.
– David M. 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 M. Ogilvy
It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them. Many clients are surrounded by buckpassers who make a fine art of blaming the agency for their own failures. I seize the earliest opportunity to assume the blame.
– David M. 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 M. 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 M. Ogilvy
Leaders grasp nettles.
– David M. Ogilvy
Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
– David M. Ogilvy
Managing an advertising agency isn't all beer and skittles. After fourteen years of it, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.
– David M. Ogilvy
Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped.
– David M. Ogilvy
Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write.
– David M. Ogilvy
Most agencies run scared, most of the time... Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising...If I were a client, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts.
– David M. Ogilvy
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.
– David M. Ogilvy
Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.
– David M. Ogilvy
Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.
– David M. Ogilvy
Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.
– David M. Ogilvy
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 M. Ogilvy
Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.
– David M. Ogilvy
Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
– David M. Ogilvy
Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don't live up to them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second rate work.
– David M. Ogilvy
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?
– David M. Ogilvy
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.
– David M. Ogilvy
The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything.
– David M. Ogilvy
The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
– David M. Ogilvy
The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife.
– David M. Ogilvy
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.
– David M. Ogilvy
The manufacturer who finds himself up the creek is the short-sighted opportunist who siphons off all his advertising dollars for short-term promotions.
– David M. Ogilvy
The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
– David M. Ogilvy
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 M. Ogilvy
The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.
– David M. Ogilvy
The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
– David M. Ogilvy
There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs.
– David M. Ogilvy
There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.
– David M. Ogilvy
There is one catagory of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections.
– David M. Ogilvy
To advertisers: Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?
– David M. Ogilvy
What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
– David M. Ogilvy
What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.
– David M. Ogilvy
You have only 30 seconds in a TV commercial. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull... When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire.
– David M. Ogilvy
You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.
– David M. Ogilvy
You now have to decide what 'image' you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place.
– David M. Ogilvy
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.
– David M. Ogilvy