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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

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David Ogilvy
Age: 88 †
Born: 1911
Born: June 23
Died: 1999
Died: July 21
Businessman
Businessperson
Economist
Writer
West Horsley
Surrey
David MacKenzie Ogilvy
Business
Manage
Entrepreneurship
Inspirational
Innovation
Thinker
Also
Management
Entrepreneur
World
Creativity
Sell
Unless
Useless
Modern
Originals
Create
Original
Creative
Sells
Entrepreneurial

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You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.
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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. Do as you would be done by.
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Leaders grasp nettles.
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If you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants
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Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.
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Experience has taught me that advertisers get the best results when they pay their agency a flat fee. It is unrealistic to expect your agency to be impartial when its vested interest lies wholly in the direction of increasing your commissionable advertising.
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I'd like to be remembered, as a copywriter who had some big ideas. That's what the advertising business is all about. Big ideas
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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.
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Never use tricky or irrelevant headlines… People read too fast to figure out what you are trying to say.
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Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving. Testing was used in advertising decades ago. The internet has made testing so easy that every online marketer can use it to improve advertising results. Google content experiment is a free tool for you to do split testing.
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What is a good advertisement? An advertisement which pleases you because of its style, or an advertisement which sells the most? They are seldom the same.
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David Ogilvy made his copywriters come up 100 different headlines for every ad they wrote.
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The trouble with many copywriters in general agencies are that they don't really think in terms of selling. They have never written direct-response they have never tasted blood
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The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore...... Pretend to be vastly interested in any subject the prospects shows an interest in.
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Many of the greatest creations of man have been inspired by the desire to make money...If Oxford undergraduates were paid for their work, I would have performed miracles of scholarship and become Regius Professor of Modern History.
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We all have a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost – for support, not for illumination.
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You have only 30 seconds in a TV commercial. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull. When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire.
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It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.
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Big ideas are usually simple ideas.
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Make sure you have a vice president in charge of your revolution, to engender ferment among your more conventional colleagues.
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