Top 200 David Ogilvy Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The hallmarks of a potentially successful copywriter include: Obsessive curiosity about products, people and advertising. A sense of humor. A habit of hard work. The ability to write interesting prose for printed media, and natural dialogue for television. The ability to think visually. Television commercials depend more on pictures than words. The ambition to write better campaigns than anyone has ever written before.”

— David Ogilvy

202. “There is one catagory of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections.”

— David Ogilvy

203. “A lot of today’s campaigns are based on optimum positioning but are totally ineffective – because they are dull, or badly constructed, or ineptly written. If nobody reads your advertisement or looks at your commercial, it doesn’t do you much good to have the right positioning.”

— David Ogilvy

204. “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.”

— David Ogilvy

205. “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

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

— David Ogilvy

207. “We like people who are honest. Honest in argument, honest with clients, honest with suppliers, honest with the company – and above all, honest with consumers.”

— David Ogilvy

208. “It pays to give most products an image of quality – a First Class ticket. This is particularly true of products whose brand-name is visible to your friends, like beer, cigarettes and automobiles: products you ‘wear.’ If.”

— David Ogilvy

209. “Agencies which frequently work nights and weekends are more stimulating, more successful – and more profitable.”

— David Ogilvy

210. “It has taken more than a hundred scientists two years to find out how to make the product in question; I have been given thirty days to create its personality and plan its launching. If I do my job well, I shall contribute as much as the hundred scientists to the success of this product.”

— David Ogilvy

211. “Concentrate your time, your brains, and your advertising money on your successes. Back your winners, and abandon your losers.”

— David Ogilvy

212. “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.”

— David Ogilvy

213. “Make sure you have a vice president in charge of your revolution, to engender ferment among your more conventional colleagues.”

— David Ogilvy

214. “It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.”

— David Ogilvy

215. “I used to start my questionnaires by asking, ‘Which would you rather hear on the radio tonight – Jack Benny or a Shakespeare play?’ If the respondent said Shakespeare, I knew he was a liar and broke off the interview.”

— David Ogilvy

216. “I can’t stand callow amateurs who aren’t sufficiently interested in the craft of advertising to assume the posture of students.”

— David Ogilvy

217. “Whatever you do, for goodness sake, don’t change the name of your corporation to initials.”

— David Ogilvy

218. “In my Confessions, I told how I started by making a list of the clients I most wanted – General Foods, Lever Brothers, Bristol Myers, Campbell Soup Company and Shell. It took time, but in due course I got them all, plus American Express, Sears Roebuck, IBM, Morgan Guaranty, Merrill Lynch and a few others, including.”

— David Ogilvy

219. “It is a good idea to start the year by writing down exactly what you want to accomplish, and end the year by measuring how much you have accomplished. McKinsey imposes this discipline on its partners and pays them according to how many of the things on their lists they accomplish. Leadership.”

— David Ogilvy

220. “You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.”

— David Ogilvy

221. “Given sufficient training, any intelligent person can learn to conduct surveys, but getting people to use the results requires salesmanship of a high order.”

— David Ogilvy

222. “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

223. “The only marketers who know what the hell they’re doing are those who have worked in sales.”

— David Ogilvy

224. “Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.”

— David Ogilvy

225. “The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it – and companies cannot grow without innovation. Great leaders almost always exude self-confidence.”

— David Ogilvy

226. “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. Word.”

— David Ogilvy

227. “You don’t have to be Christian to behave like a gentleman!”

— David Ogilvy

228. “I never assign a product to a writer unless I know that he is personally interested in it. Every time I have written a bad campaign, it has been because the product did not interest me.”

— David Ogilvy

229. “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. Profit.”

— David Ogilvy

230. “Never summon people to your office; it frightens them. Instead, go to see them in their offices, unannounced. A boss who never wanders about his agency becomes an invisible hermit. 3.”

— David Ogilvy

231. “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

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

— David Ogilvy

233. “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.”

— David Ogilvy

234. “Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement,’ said Samuel Johnson.”

— David Ogilvy

235. “Remember the French saying: ‘He who is absent is always wrong.”

— David Ogilvy

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

— David Ogilvy

237. “Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.”

— David Ogilvy

238. “Rosser Reeves: ‘Do you want fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve start moving up?”

— David Ogilvy

239. “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. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.”

— David Ogilvy

240. “I was infinitely more useful to my clients when I wrote copy than when I was Chairman of the Board.”

— David Ogilvy

241. “All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short.”

— David Ogilvy

242. “I like to succeed in public, but to fail in secret.”

— David Ogilvy