David Ogilvy Quotes

If I stayed at the Majestic I would have faced years of slave wages, fiendish pressure, and perpetual exhaustion.

Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.

I doubt whether any copywriter has ever had so many winners in such a short period of time. They made Ogilvy & Mather so hot that getting clients was like shooting fish in a barrel.

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.

The most important decision is how to position your product.

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.

‘Making the logo twice the size’ is often a good thing to do, because most advertisements are deficient in brand identification. ‘Showing the clients' faces’ is also a better stratagem than it may sound, because the public is more interested in personalities than in corporations. Some clients can be projected as human symbols of their own products.

It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement, and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and read. Therefore, study the graphics used by editors and imitate them. Study the graphics used in advertisements, and avoid them.

Most readers look at the photograph first. If you put it in the middle of the page, the reader will start by looking in the middle. Then her eye must go up to read the headline; this doesn't work, because people have a habit of scanning downwards. However, suppose a few readers do read the headline after seeing the photograph below it. After that, you require them to jump down past the photograph which they have already seen. Not bloody likely.

Dr. Gallup reports that if you say something which you don't also illustrate, the viewer immediately forgets it. I conclude that if you don't show it there is no point in saying it. Try running your commercial with the sound turned off; if it doesn't tell without sound, it is useless.

One of the most brilliant colleagues I ever had was black-balled by three clients in one year; the experience hurt him so badly that he left the agency business for ever. If you are too thin-skinned to survive this hazard, you should not become an account executive in an advertising agency.

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

We sell – or else.

No sale, no commission. No commission, no eat. That made an impression on me.

You can’t save souls in an empty church.

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

What most clients want most from us is great campaigns, with the spark to ignite sales and the staying power to build enduring brands. We put the creative function at the top of our priorities.

The line between pride in our work and neurotic obstinacy is a narrow one. We make our recommendations clear. But we do not grudge our clients the right to the final say. It is their money.

We exist to build the business of our clients. The recommendations we make to them should be the recommendations we would make if we owned their companies, without regard to our own short-term interest,” he said. “This earns their respect, which is the greatest asset we can have.

We try to create an atmosphere in which partnerships with our clients can flourish. We attach importance to discretion — clients don't appreciate agencies that leak their secrets. We do not take credit for our clients' successes. To get between a client and the footlights is bad manners.

I once found myself conspiring with a British Cabinet Minister as to how we might persuade Her Majesty's Treasury to cough up more money for the British Travel advertising in America. Said he, "Why does any American in his senses spend his vacation in the cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under Italian skies? I can only suppose that your advertising is the answer." Damn right.

While you are responsible to your clients for sales results, you are responsible to consumers for the kind of advertising you bring into their homes.

I abhor advertising that is blatant, dull, or dishonest. Agencies which transgress this principle are not widely respected.

Never run an advertisement you would not want your own family to see.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to read.

You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.

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

I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the chaos of ignorance.

We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles.

Great hospitals do two things. They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people.

Do not summon people to your office - it frightens them. Instead go to see them in their offices. This makes you visible throughout the agency. A Chairman who never wanders about his agency becomes a hermit, out of touch with his staff.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. Test your promise. Test your media. Test your headlines and your illustrations. Test the size of your advertisements. Test your frequency. Test your level of expenditure. Test your commercials. Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

You aren't advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who'll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.

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?

Candor compels me to admit that I have no conclusive research to support my view that jingles are less persuasive than the spoken word. You’d run like hell if a salesman came to your door and began singing at you. Why do it in advertising?

If we hire people who are smaller than we are, we will become a company of dwarfs. If we hire people who are larger than we are, we’ll become a company of giants.

Some of our people spend their entire working lives in Ogilvy & Mather. We try to make it a stimulating and happy experience. We put this first, believing that superior service to our clients depends on the high morale of our men and women. We help them make the best of their talents. We invest an awful lot of time and money in training — perhaps more than any of our competitors.

We see no conflict between adherence to high professional standards in our work and human kindness in our dealings with each other. We treat our people as human beings.

I believe in the Scottish proverb: ‘Hard work never killed a man.’ Men die of boredom, psychological conflict and disease. They do not die of hard work.

I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.

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

Lazy and superficial men and women do not produce superior work.

Ogilvy & Mather – one company, indivisible.

The top man has one principle responsibility – to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.

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

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

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don't live up to them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second rate work.

The psychiatrists say that everybody should have a hobby. The hobby I recommend is advertising.

L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. That is not true. I have come to believe that it pays to make all your layouts project a feeling of good taste, provided that you do it unobtrusively. An ugly layout suggests an ugly product. There are very few products which do not benefit from being given a first class ticket through life.

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.

The purpose of a commercial is not to entertain the viewer but to sell him. Horace Schwerin reports that there is no correlation between people liking commercials and being sold by them. But this does not mean that your commercials should be deliberately bad mannered. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that it pays to make them human and friendly, if you can do so without being unctuous.

Madison Avenue is full of masochists who unconsciously provoke rejection by their clients. I know brilliant men who have lost every account they have ever handled.

Raise your sights! Blaze new trails!! Compete with the immortals!!!

It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to ‘come up with something new’ every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image, and the stability to stick with it over a long period.

We take new business seriously, especially new business from current clients. We have a passion for winning, but we play fair vis-a-vis our competitors.

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?

Look before you leap.

The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.

I had a friend who was the King's surgeon in England. One day I asked him what makes a great surgeon. He replied, "What distinguishes a great surgeon is his knowledge. He knows more than other surgeons. During an operation he finds something which he wasn't expecting, recognizes it and knows what to do about it." It's the same thing with advertising people. The good ones know more. How do you get to know more? By reading books about advertising. By picking the brains of people who know more than you do. From the Magic Lanterns. And from experience.

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

Training should not be confined to trainees. It should be a continuous process, and should include the entire professional staff of the agency. The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients.

Superior service to our clients depends on making the most of our people. Give them challenging opportunities, recognition for achievement, job enrichment and the maximum responsibility. Treat them as grown-ups - and they will grow up. Help them in difficulty. Be affectionate and human.

We help them make the best of their talents. We invest an awful lot of time and money in training — perhaps more than any of our competitors.

We treat our people as human beings. We help them when they are in trouble — with their jobs, with illnesses, with emotional problems, with drugs or alcohol.

We are opposed to management by intimidation. We abhor ruthlessness. We like people with gentle manners. We see no conflict between adherence to high professional standards in our work and human kindness in our dealings with each other.

We don't like rigid pecking orders. We give our executives an extraordinary degree of independence, in the belief that freedom stimulates initiative. We dislike issuing orders; the best results are produced by men and women who don't have to be told what to do.

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.

I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings. I abhor quarrelsome people. I abhor people who wage paper-warfare.

I despise toadies who suck up to their bosses; they are generally the same people who bully their subordinates.

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

We admire people who speak their minds. At the same time we admire people who listen more than they talk, and make a real effort to understand views that differ from their own. Candor is a virtue; arrogance is not.

If you ever find a man who is better than you are - hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself.

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?

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

To keep your ship moving through the water at maximum efficiency, you have to keep scraping the barnacles off its bottom. It is rare for a department head to recommend the abolition of a job, or even the elimination of a man; the pressure from below is always for adding. If the initiative for barnacle-scraping does not come from management, barnacles will never be scraped.

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

Nowadays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on "teamwork" is bunkum - a conspiracy of the mediocre majority.

I don't believe in this specialisation. Who said that there's one breed of cat which is an account executive, and then there are the creative people - and they are quite different? This has been perpetuated by both sides for years. It's nonsense.

Will Any Agency Hire This Man?

He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college.

He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer.

He knows nothing about marketing and has never written any copy.

He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year.

I doubt if any American agency will hire him.

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

You now have to decide what 'image' you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

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 get on with it.

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

Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.

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

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.

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

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.

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

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.

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.

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

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.

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.

I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good manners.

Most agencies run scared, most of the time... Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising...If I were a client, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts.

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.

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.

I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I have a previous engagement with another client; successful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach.

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

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

Make sure you have a Vice President in charge of Revolution, to engender ferment among your more conventional colleagues.

The more prospects you talk to, the more sales you expose yourself to, the more orders you will get. But never mistake quantity of calls for quality of sales-manship.

I hate rules.

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.

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.

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



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