David Ogilvy Quotes

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.

I like to succeed in public, but to fail in secret.

Long copy sells more than short copy, particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money.

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

When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’ Pursuit

I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any; he preferred to rely on his own intuition. ‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘your gall-bladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where to find your gall-bladder, or a surgeon who relies on his intuition? Why should our clients be expected to bet millions of dollars on your intuition?

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.

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.

However able they may be, ambitious people won’t stay in outfits which practice nepotism. This is one mistake I did not make; my son is in the real estate business, secure in the knowledge that he owes nothing of his success to his father.

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.

Tell your prospective client what your weak points are, before he notices them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.

Agencies add new services the way universities add new courses. Nothing wrong with that if you also discontinue services which have outlived their relevance. To keep your boat moving through the water, keep scraping the barnacles off its bottom.

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

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

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.