Top 100 David Ogilvy Quotes
#1. We like people who are honest. Honest in argument, honest with clients, honest with suppliers, honest with the company - and above all, honest with consumers.
David Ogilvy
#2. 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 Ogilvy
#3. Repeat your winners. If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency.
David Ogilvy
#4. 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
#5. Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.
David Ogilvy
#6. Committees can criticize, but they cannot create.
David Ogilvy
#7. 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 Ogilvy
#8. 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 Ogilvy
#9. The most effective leader is the one who satisfies the psychological needs of his followers.
David Ogilvy
#10. Claude Hopkins.. maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock.
David Ogilvy
#11. 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
#12. You cannot bore people into buying your product - you can only interest them in buying it.
David Ogilvy
#13. Study the methods of your competitors and do the exact opposite.
David Ogilvy
#14. I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good manners.
David Ogilvy
#15. Consumers don't think how they feel. They don't say what they think and they don't do what they say.
David Ogilvy
#16. I'd like to be remembered, as a copywriter who had some big ideas. That's what the advertising business is all about. Big ideas
David Ogilvy
#17. A lot of today's campaigns are based on optimum positioning but are totally ineffective - because they are dull, or badly constructed, or ineptly written. If nobody reads your advertisement or looks at your commercial, it doesn't do you much good to have the right positioning.
David Ogilvy
#18. Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.
David Ogilvy
#19. 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 Ogilvy
#20. The line between pride in our work and neurotic obstinacy is a narrow one. We make our recommendations clear. But we do not grudge our clients the right to the final say. It is their money.
David Ogilvy
#21. Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.
David Ogilvy
#22. Try and inject into every commercial you make a touch of singularity; a bird that will hook on to the consumers mind
David Ogilvy
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
David Ogilvy
#26. What is a good advertisement? An advertisement which pleases you because of its style, or an advertisement which sells the most? They are seldom the same.
David Ogilvy
#27. One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation.
David Ogilvy
#28. I don't believe in tricky advertising, I don't believe in cute advertising, I don't believe in comic advertising. The people who perpetrate that kind of advertising never had to sell anything in their lives
David Ogilvy
#29. Supposing you've got an acute appendicitis. You've got to be operated on tonight. Would you like to have a surgeon who's read some books of anatomy and knows how to do that operation - or would you prefer to have a surgeon who refused to read all books about anatomy and relied on his own instinct?
David Ogilvy
#30. Within every brand is a product, but not every product is a brand.
David Ogilvy
#31. Creativity Is a fancy word for the work we have to do by Friday.
David Ogilvy
#32. Encourage innovation. Change is our lifeblood, stagnation our death knell.
David Ogilvy
#33. Positioning should be decided before the advertising is created
David Ogilvy
#34. 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
#35. 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 Ogilvy
#36. 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 Ogilvy
#37. Most agencies run scared, most of the time ... Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising ... If I were aclient, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts.
David Ogilvy
#38. 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.
David Ogilvy
#39. Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
David Ogilvy
#40. To advertisers: "Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?"
David Ogilvy
#41. 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 Ogilvy
#42. 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 Ogilvy
#43. In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. 'Search the parks in all your cities You'll find no statues of committees.
David Ogilvy
#44. Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.
David Ogilvy
#46. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it,
David Ogilvy
#47. 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 Ogilvy
#48. Our offices must always be headed by the kind of men who command respect. Not phonies, zeros or bastards.
David Ogilvy
#49. My motto has always been: Only first class business and that in a first class way
David Ogilvy
#50. We all have a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost - for support, but not for illumination
David Ogilvy
#51. 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
#52. I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.
David Ogilvy
#53. 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 Ogilvy
#54. The temptation to entertain instead of selling is contagious.
David Ogilvy
#55. People don't buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television last night.
David Ogilvy
#56. I never assign a product to a writer unless I know that he is personally interested in it. Every time I have written a bad campaign, it has been because the product did not interest me.
David Ogilvy
#57. 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 Ogilvy
#59. Never allow two people to do a job which one could do. George Washington observed, 'Whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty by close application thereto, it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.
David Ogilvy
#60. If you can't be brilliant, at least be memorable
David Ogilvy
#61. What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
David Ogilvy
#62. I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings.
David Ogilvy
#63. The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore ... Pretend to be vastly interested in any subject the prospects shows an interest in.
David Ogilvy
#65. Most headlines are set too big to be legible in the magazines or newspaper. Never approve a layout until you have seen it pasted into the magazine or newspaper for which it was destined. If you pin up the layouts on a bulletin board and appraise them from fifteen feet, you will produce posters.
David Ogilvy
#66. It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year. This is difficult to achieve, because there are always forces at work to change the advertising
David Ogilvy
#67. 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
#69. 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
#70. When people aren't having any fun, they seldom produce good work. Kill the grimness with laughter. Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs that spread gloom.
David Ogilvy
#71. The general advertisers and their agencies know almost nothing for sure, because they cannot measure the results of their advertising. They worship at the altar of creativity, which really means 'originality': The most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising
David Ogilvy
#72. Sound an alarm! Advertising, not deals, builds brands.
David Ogilvy
#73. Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga.
David Ogilvy
#74. If you can't advertise yourself, what hope do you have of advertising anything else?
David Ogilvy
#75. The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their character. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it.
David Ogilvy
#76. 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 Ogilvy
#77. Nowadays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on "teamwork" is bunkum - a conspiracy of the mediocre majority.
David Ogilvy
#78. I have an inviolable rule against employing nepots and spouses, because they breed politics. Whenever two people get married, one of them must depart - preferably the female, to look after the baby.
David Ogilvy
#79. Never use tricky or irrelevant headlines ... People read too fast to figure out what you are trying to say.
David Ogilvy
#80. 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 Ogilvy
#81. The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
David Ogilvy
#82. Many of the greatest creations of man have been inspired by the desire to make money ... If Oxford undergraduates were paid for their work, I would have performed miracles of scholarship and become Regius Professor of Modern History.
David Ogilvy
#83. The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything.
David Ogilvy
#84. Training should not be confined to trainees. It should be a continuous process, and should include the entire professional staff of the agency. The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients.
David Ogilvy
#85. Develop your eccentricities early, and no one will think you're going senile later in life
David Ogilvy
#86. The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
David Ogilvy
#88. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.
David Ogilvy
#89. Readers travel so fast they don't stop to decipher the meaning of obscure headlines.
David Ogilvy
#90. Don't just create content to get credit for being clever - create content that will be helpful, insightful, or interesting for your target audience.
David Ogilvy
#92. I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance.
David Ogilvy
#93. David Ogilvy made his copywriters come up 100 different headlines for every ad they wrote.
David Ogilvy
#94. We exist to build the business of our clients. The recommendations we make to them should be the recommendations we would make if we owned their companies, without regard to our own short-term interest. This earns their respect, which is the greatest asset we can have.
David Ogilvy
#95. Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.
David Ogilvy
#96. Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark. Aim for the company of immortals.
David Ogilvy
#97. I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.
David Ogilvy
#98. Great hospitals do two things. They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people.
David Ogilvy
#99. I can't stand callow amateurs who aren't sufficiently interested in the craft of advertising to assume the posture of students.
David Ogilvy
#100. Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on.
David Ogilvy
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