David Ogilvy Quotes

I once found myself conspiring with a president of the Board of Trade as to how we might persuade H.M. Treasury to cough up more money for the British Travel advertising in America. Said Sir David Eccles, “Why does any American in his senses spend his holidays in the cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under Italian advertising is the answer.” Quite so.

The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.

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.

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.

The best way to settle such arguments is to measure the selling effectiveness of your campaign at regular intervals, and to go on running it until the research shows that it has worn out.

Training should not be confined progress, and should include the entire professional staff of the agency. The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients.

I used to start my questionnaires by asking, ‘Which would you rather hear on the radio tonight – Jack Benny or a Shakespeare play?’ If the respondent said Shakespeare, I knew he was a liar and broke off the interview.

Senior men have no monopoly on great ideas. Nor do creative people. Some of the best ideas come from account executives, researchers, and others. Encourage this; you need all the ideas you can get.

I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.

I believe in the Scottish proverb: “Hard work never psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work.”

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Before them, obstacles vanish into thin air and mountains crumble into atoms.

Some years ago a prayer was read from the pulpit in every church in Greece, asking the Almighty to spare the Greeks from the ‘scourge’ of foreign tourism.

When copywriters argue with me about some esoteric word they want to use, I say to them, ‘Get on a bus. Go to Iowa. Stay on a farm for a week and talk to the farmer. Come back to New York by train and talk to your fellow passengers in the day-coach. If you still want to use the word, go ahead.

It pays to boil down your strategy to one simple promise and go the whole hog in delivering that promise.

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.