Top 200 David Ogilvy Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money...”

— David Ogilvy

102. “Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on.”

— David Ogilvy

103. “Most good copywriters’, says William Maynard of the Bates agency, ’fall into two categories. Poets. And killers.”

— David Ogilvy

104. “The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything.”

— David Ogilvy

105. “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

106. “In most agencies, account executives outnumber the copywriters two to one. If you were a dairy farmer, would you employ twice as many milkers as you had cows?”

— David Ogilvy

107. “The most effective leader is the one who satisfies the psychological needs of his followers.”

— David Ogilvy

108. “Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left. It’s totally dishonest.”

— David Ogilvy

109. “Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.”

— David Ogilvy

110. “Lazy and superficial men and women do not produce superior work.”

— David Ogilvy

111. “Why should a manufacturer bet his money, perhaps the future of his company, on your instinct?”

— David Ogilvy

112. “Hard work, says the Scottish proverb, never killed a man.”

— David Ogilvy

113. “Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.”

— David Ogilvy

114. “Why do eight out of ten new consumer products fail? Sometimes because they are too new. The first cold cereals were rejected by consumers. More often new products fail because they are not new enough.”

— David Ogilvy

115. “I saw the head chef at the Hotel Majestic fire a pastry cook because the poor devil could not get his brioches to rise straight. This ruthlessness made all the other chefs feel that they were working in the best kitchen in the world.”

— David Ogilvy

116. “Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing. Many.”

— David Ogilvy

117. “Supposing you’ve got an acute appendicitis. You’ve got to be operated on tonight. Would you like to have a surgeon who’s read some books of anatomy and knows how to do that operation – or would you prefer to have a surgeon who refused to read all books about anatomy and relied on his own instinct?”

— David Ogilvy

118. “The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their character. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it.”

— David Ogilvy

119. “The majority of business men are not capable of an original thought, simply because they cannot escape the tyranny of reason.”

— David Ogilvy

120. “People don’t buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television last night.”

— David Ogilvy

121. “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

— David Ogilvy

122. “First, study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it.”

— David Ogilvy

123. “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. Seven.”

— David Ogilvy

124. “I never write fewer than sixteen headlines for a single advertisement.”

— David Ogilvy

125. “Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around the table.”

— David Ogilvy

126. “One day a man walked into a London agency and asked to see the boss. He had bought a country house and was about to open it as a hotel. Could the agency help him to get customers? He had $500 to spend. Not surprisingly, the head of the agency turned him over to the office boy, who happened to be the author of this book. I invested his money in penny postcards and mailed them to well-heeled people living in the neighborhood. Six weeks later the hotel opened to a full house. I had tasted blood.”

— David Ogilvy

127. “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.”

— David Ogilvy

128. “The more story-appeal there is in the picture or in the photograph, the more people would look at your ad.”

— David Ogilvy

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

— David Ogilvy

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

— David Ogilvy

131. “One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation.”

— David Ogilvy

132. “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

133. “To advertisers: “Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?””

— David Ogilvy

134. “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.”

— David Ogilvy

135. “Try and inject into every commercial you make a touch of singularity; a bird that will hook on to the consumers mind.”

— David Ogilvy

136. “Don’t just create content to get credit for being clever – create content that will be helpful, insightful, or interesting for your target audience.”

— David Ogilvy

137. “The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.”

— David Ogilvy

138. “Aldous Huxley, who was once a copywriter, said, ‘It is easier to write ten passably effective sonnets than one effective advertisement.’ You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.”

— David Ogilvy

139. “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.”

— David Ogilvy

140. “If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data – it doesn’t mean the ad is written. Then you’ve got to close the door and write something – that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.”

— David Ogilvy

141. “Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.”

— David Ogilvy

142. “Managing an advertising agency isn’t all beer and skittles. After fourteen years of it, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.”

— David Ogilvy

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

— David Ogilvy

144. “If you, my fellow copywriters or art directors, want to win the award, devote your genius to making the cash register ring.”

— David Ogilvy

145. “I don’t believe in tricky advertising, I don’t believe in cute advertising, I don’t believe in comic advertising. The people who perpetrate that kind of advertising never had to sell anything in their lives.”

— David Ogilvy

146. “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

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

— David Ogilvy

148. “Most headlines are set too big to be legible in the magazines or newspaper. Never approve a layout until you have seen it pasted into the magazine or newspaper for which it was destined. If you pin up the layouts on a bulletin board and appraise them from fifteen feet, you will produce posters.”

— David Ogilvy

149. “The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.”

— David Ogilvy

150. “It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.”

— David Ogilvy