David Ogilvy Quotes

All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.

When you are appointed to head an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send you one of these Russian dolls. Inside the smallest you will find 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, Ogilvy & Mather will become a company of giants.’ With

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

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.

H. L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. That is not true. I have come to believe that it pays to make all your layouts project that you do it unobtrusively. An ugly layout suggests an ugly product. There are very few products which do not benefit from being given a first-class ticket through life.

Sound an alarm! Advertising, not deals, builds brands.

People don't think what they feel, don't say what they think and don't do what they say.

It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to “come up with something new” every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains and the stability to stick with it over a long period.

Most good copywriters’, says William Maynard of the Bates agency, ‘fall into two categories. Poets. And killers.

When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another, second person singular.

Any fool can write a bad advertisement, but it takes a genius to keep his hands off a good one.

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.

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?

If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.