Quotes By David Ogilvy

The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.

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.

Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You've got to believe in the product.

The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.

There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs.

The headline is the 'ticket on the meat.' Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.

Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.

The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.

I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.

Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.

Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga.

I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.

What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.

I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes.

Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.

Leaders grasp nettles.

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