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Creativity needs discipline and freedom.

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
Discipline
Creativity
Freedom
Needs

More quotes by David Ogilvy

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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.
David Ogilvy
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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?
David Ogilvy
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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.
David Ogilvy
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Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.
David Ogilvy
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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.
David Ogilvy
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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
David Ogilvy
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Why do eight out of ten new consumer products fail? Sometimes because they are too new. The first cold cereals were rejected by consumers. More often new products fail because they are not new enough.
David Ogilvy
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Headlines can be strengthend by the inclusion of emotional words like darling, love, fear, proud, friend and baby.
David Ogilvy
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The business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull.... our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.
David Ogilvy
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No sale, no commission. No commission, no eat. That made an impression on me.
David Ogilvy
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It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.
David Ogilvy
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The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.
David Ogilvy
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If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.
David Ogilvy
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Positioning should be decided before the advertising is created
David Ogilvy
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I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.
David Ogilvy
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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.
David Ogilvy
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Study the methods of your competitors and do the exact opposite.
David Ogilvy
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Why should a manufacturer bet his money, perhaps the future of his company, on your instinct?
David Ogilvy
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I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance.
David Ogilvy
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The consumer isn't a moron she is your wife.
David Ogilvy