Quote

If you have a truly big idea, the wrong technique won't kill it. And if you don't have a big idea, the right technique won't help you

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
Wrong
Help
Bigs
Idea
Helping
Ideas
Technique
Right
Kill
Truly

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Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.
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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.
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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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Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.
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Consumers don't think how they feel. They don't say what they think and they don't do what they say.
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Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.
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When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.
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You can't save souls in an empty church.
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Creativity needs discipline and freedom.
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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.
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Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating.
David Ogilvy
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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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Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.
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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.
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...consumers do not buy one brand of soap, or coffee, or detergent. They have a repertory of four or five brands, and move from one to another. They almost never buy a brand which has not been admitted to their repertory during its first year on the market.
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Our offices must always be headed by the kind of men who command respect. Not phonies, zeros or bastards.
David Ogilvy
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I don't believe in tricky advertising, I don't believe in cute advertising, I don't believe in comic advertising. The people who perpetrate that kind of advertising never had to sell anything in their lives
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Why should a manufacturer bet his money, perhaps the future of his company, on your instinct?
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I can't stand callow amateurs who aren't sufficiently interested in the craft of advertising to assume the posture of students.
David Ogilvy
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My motto has always been: Only first class business and that in a first class way
David Ogilvy