David Ogilvy Quotes

While you are responsible to your clients for sales results, you are also responsible to consumers for the kind of advertising you bring into their homes. I abhor advertising that is blatant, dull, or dishonest. Agencies which transgress this principle are not widely respected.

You aren't advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who’ll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into and keep it sweeping.

You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.

Nowadays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on “teamwork” is bunkum – a conspiracy of the mediocre majority.

A lot of advertisements and television commercials look like minutes of a committee meeting, and that is what they are. Advertising seems to sell most when it is written by a solitary individual. He must study the product, the research, and the precedents. Then he must shut the door of his office and write the advertisements.

Don't expect your agency to pay for all the dry holes they drill on your behalf.

The best way to get new accounts is to create for our present clients the kind of advertising that will attract prospective clients. We do not have new business departments in our offices. No first-class man will take the job; no second-class man can do it effectively.

If you resign accounts every time you feel like doing so, you will empty your portfolio every year.

I always use my clients' products. This is not toadyism but elementary good manners.

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

One of the most brilliant blackballed by three clients in one year; the experience hurt him so badly that he left the agency business forever. If you are too thin-skinned to survive this hazard, you should not become an account executive in an advertising agency.

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.

I don't believe in this specialization. Who said there's one breed of cat which is an account executive, and then there are the creative people – and they are quite different? This has been perpetuated by both sides for years. It's nonsense.

Few of the great creators have bland personalities. They are cantankerous egotists, the kind of men who are unwelcome in the modern corporation.

Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?