David Ogilvy - Advertising Quotes

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The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

David Ogilvy
What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.

David Ogilvy
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.

David Ogilvy
Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

David Ogilvy
Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

David Ogilvy
Managing an advertising agency isn't all beer and skittles. After fourteen years of it, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.

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

David Ogilvy
You aren't advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.

David Ogilvy
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.

David Ogilvy
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.

David Ogilvy
Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

David Ogilvy
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.

David Ogilvy
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
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.

David Ogilvy
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.

David Ogilvy
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

David Ogilvy
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.

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

David Ogilvy
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.

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

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

David Ogilvy
Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.

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

David Ogilvy
Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.

David Ogilvy
I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product.

David Ogilvy
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.

David Ogilvy
Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.

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

David Ogilvy
Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.

David Ogilvy
There is one catagory of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections.

David Ogilvy