Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
- David Ogilvy Quote

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.
- David Ogilvy Quote

Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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

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

First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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.
- David Ogilvy Quote

I did not feel 'evil' when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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.
- David Ogilvy Quote

I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; 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.
- David Ogilvy Quote

If each of us hires people smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.
- David Ogilvy Quote

It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.
- David Ogilvy Quote

Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
- David Ogilvy Quote

Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write.
- David Ogilvy Quote

Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.
- David Ogilvy Quote

Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
- David Ogilvy Quote

The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything.
- David Ogilvy Quote

The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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.
- David Ogilvy Quote

The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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.
- David Ogilvy Quote

The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
- David Ogilvy Quote

There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.
- David Ogilvy Quote

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

What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.
- David Ogilvy Quote