David Ogilvy
33 quotes
"At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock."
"When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it "creative". I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, "How well he speaks". When Demosthenes spoke, they said, "Let us march against Philip.""
"… there are now unmistakeable signs of a trend in favor of superior products at premium prices. The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife."
"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."
"Viewers have a way of remembering the celebrity while forgetting the product. I did not know this when I paid Eleanor Roosevelt $35,000 to make a commercial for margarine. She reported that her mail was equally divided. "One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation." Not one of my proudest memories."
"When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: 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."
"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."
"The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years."
"I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information."
"The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible."
"Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon."
"The consumer isn't a moron she is your wife."
"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."
"In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible."
"Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You've got to believe in the product."
"Leaders grasp nettles."
"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."
"The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything."
"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."
"Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them."