David Ogilvy Quotes

The day after a new business presentation, send the prospect a three-page letter summarizing the reasons why he should pick your agency. This will help him make the right decision. If

We have a divine discontent with our performance. It is an antidote to smugness.

A lot of successful advertising was created before POSITIONING 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 good to have the right positioning.

In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. ‘Search the parks in all your cities You’ll find no statues of committees.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.

Given sufficient training, any intelligent person can learn to conduct surveys, but getting people to use the results requires salesmanship of a high order.

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon. They say that the commercials for food products must include “an affirmative eating experience.” The latest horror is SUBOPTIMIZE.

On average, helpful information is read by 75 per cent more people than copy which deals only with the product. This ad told how Rinso gets out stains. It was read and remembered

Sales are a function of product-value and advertising. Promotions cannot produce more than a temporary kink in the sales curve.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. Test your premise. Test your media. Test your headlines and your illustrations. Test the size of your advertisements. Test your frequency. Test your level of expenditure. Test your commercials. Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

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.

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.

Do you think it childish to use a set of written principles to guide the management of an advertising agency? I can only tell you that mine have proved invaluable in keeping a complicated enterprise on course.

Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around the table.