David Ogilvy Quotes

The purpose of a commercial is not to entertain the viewer but to sell him. Horace Schwerin reports that there is no correlation between people liking commercials and being sold by them. But this does not mean that your commercials should be deliberately bad-mannered. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that it pays to make them human and friendly, if you can do so without being unctuous.

St Augustine had this to say about pressure: ‘To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world: war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures, and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendor. But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure, but does not complain. For it is the friction which polishes him. It is pressure which refines and makes him noble.

In most agencies, account executives outnumber the copywriters two to one. If you you employ twice as many milkers as you had cows?

Most manufacturers are reluctant to accept any limitation on the image of their brand. They want it to be all things to all people. They want their brand to be a male brand and a female brand. An upper -class brand and a plebeian brand. They generally end up with a brand which has no personality of any kind, a wishy-washy neuter. No capon ever rules the roost.

If each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

Our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.

Said Winston Churchill, ‘PERFECTIONISM is spelled PARALYSIS.

Whatever you do, for goodness sake, don’t change the name of your corporation to initials.

Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. 'Standing room only' creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure.

It is the professional duty of the advertising agent to conceal his artifice. When Aeschines spoke, they said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.” I’m in for Demosthenes.

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.

A psychologist flashed hundreds of words on a screen and used an electric gadget to measure emotional reactions. High marks went to darling. So I used it in a headline for Dove.

Unless your advertising is built on a BIG IDEA it will pass like a ship in the night.

Madison Avenue is full of masochists who unconsciously provoke rejection by their clients. I know brilliant men who have lost every account they have handled.

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets with of iambic pentameter, rhyming in his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote sonatas within an equally rigid discipline – exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?