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.

We sell — or else.

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.

Big ideas are usually simple ideas.

Encourage innovation. Change is our lifeblood, stagnation our death knell.

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

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.

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. Do as you would be done by.

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.

Viewers have a way of remembering the celebrity while forgetting the product. I did not know this when I paid Eleanor Roosevelt $35,000 to make a commercial for margarine. She reported that her mail was equally divided. "One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation." Not one of my proudest memories.

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.

… there are now unmistakeable signs of a trend in favor of superior products at premium prices. The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.

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. When Aeschines spoke, they said, "How well he speaks". When Demosthenes spoke, they said, "Let us march against Philip."

At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.

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.