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Top 200 David Ogilvy Quotes (2025 Update)
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David Ogilvy Quote: “The easiest way to get new clients is to do good advertising. During one period of seven years, we never failed to win an account for which we competed, and all I did was to show the campaigns we had created.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 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: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Agencies which frequently work nights and weekends are more stimulating, more successful – and more profitable.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “Concentrate your time, your brains, and your advertising money on your successes. Back your winners, and abandon your losers.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “Make sure you have a vice president in charge of your revolution, to engender ferment among your more conventional colleagues.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “I can’t stand callow amateurs who aren’t sufficiently interested in the craft of advertising to assume the posture of students.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “Whatever you do, for goodness sake, don’t change the name of your corporation to initials.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 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: “The only marketers who know what the hell they’re doing are those who have worked in sales.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “You don’t have to be Christian to behave like a gentleman!”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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: “Sales are a function of product-value and advertising. Promotions cannot produce more than a temporary kink in the sales curve.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement,’ said Samuel Johnson.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “Remember the French saying: ‘He who is absent is always wrong.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “Long copy sells more than short copy, particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “I was infinitely more useful to my clients when I wrote copy than when I was Chairman of the Board.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short.”
David Ogilvy Quote: “I like to succeed in public, but to fail in secret.”
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