David 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.Collection: Jobs
I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.Collection: Hours
Nobody should be allowed to create general advertising until he has served his apprenticeship in direct-responseCollection: Advertising
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 advertisingCollection: Mean
Once upon a time I was riding on the top of a First Avenue bus, when I heard a mythical housewife say to another, "Molly, my dear, I would have bought that new brand of toilet soap if only they hadn't set the body copy in ten point Garamond." Don't you believe it. What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.Collection: Believe
My motto has always been: Only first class business and that in a first class wayCollection: Class
The manufacturer who finds himself up the creek is the short-sighted opportunist who siphons off all his advertising dollars for short-term promotions.Collection: Dollars
Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving. Testing was used in advertising decades ago. The internet has made testing so easy that every online marketer can use it to improve advertising results. Google content experiment is a free tool for you to do split testing.Collection: Google
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.Collection: Campaigns
When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: 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.Collection: Office
You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.Collection: Business
I once found myself conspiring with a British Cabinet Minister as to how we might persuade Her Majesty's Treasury to cough up more money for the British Travel advertising in America. Said he, "Why does any American in his senses spend his vacation in the cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under Italian skies? I can only suppose that your advertising is the answer." Damn right.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Education
One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation.Collection: Half
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.Collection: Art
A consumer is not a moron. She's your wife. Don't insult her intelligence, and don't shock her.Collection: Wife
Agencies which frequently work nights and weekends are more stimulating, more successful - and more profitable.Collection: Successful
Don’t just create content to get credit for being clever — create content that will be helpful, insightful, or interesting for your target audience.Collection: Clever
It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.Collection: Fire
Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.Collection: Humor
It's not creative unless it sells.Collection: Creative
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.Collection: Strong
It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.Collection: Copywriting
Readers travel so fast they don't stop to decipher the meaning of obscure headlines.Collection: Obscure
Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on.Collection: Promise
At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.Collection: Noise
If you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giantsCollection: People
The psychiatrists say that everybody should have a hobby. The hobby I recommend is advertisingCollection: Should Have
The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.Collection: Giving
Don't hire a dog, then bark yourselfCollection: Dog
Our offices must always be headed by the kind of men who command respect. Not phonies, zeros or bastards.Collection: Men
Candor compels me to admit that I have no conclusive research to support my view that jingles are less persuasive than the spoken word. You'd run like hell if a salesman came to your door and began singing at you. Why do it in advertising?Collection: Running
Madison Avenue is full of masochists who unconsciously provoke rejection by their clients. I know brilliant men who have lost every account they have ever handled.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Business
I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings.Collection: People
When you have nothing to say, sing it.Collection: Advertising
Making the logo twice the size is often a good thing to do, because most advertisements are deficient in brand identification. Showing the clients' faces is also a better stratagem than it may sound, because the public is more interested in personalities than in corporations. Some clients can be projected as human symbols of their own products.Collection: Personality
Advertising is the place where the selfish interests of the manufacturer coincide with the interests of society.Collection: Selfish
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.Collection: Teamwork
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.Collection: Teamwork
There is one catagory of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections.Collection: Humorous
If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.Collection: Writing
David Ogilvy made his copywriters come up 100 different headlines for every ad they wrote.Collection: Different
If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.Collection: Important
If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data - it doesn't mean the ad is written. Then you've got to close the door and write something - that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.Collection: Business
It's the lack of ambition that cripples most people, and makes them so pedestrian in the advertising/creative businessCollection: Ambition
While you are responsible to your clients for sales results, you are responsible to consumers for the kind of advertising you bring into their homes.Collection: Home
People don't buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television last night.Collection: Night
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.Collection: Running