David Ogilvy - Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)

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

David Ogilvy
I have an inviolable rule against employing nepots and spouses, because they breed politics. Whenever two people get married, one of them must depart - preferably the female, to look after the baby.

David Ogilvy
Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.

David Ogilvy
The best headline I ever wrote contained eighteen words: At Sixty Miles an Hour the Loudest Noise in the New Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.

David Ogilvy
There isn't any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.

David Ogilvy
The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.

David Ogilvy
Make sure that your agency makes a profit. Your account competes with all the other accounts in your agency. If it is unprofitable, it is unlikely that the management of the agency will assign their best men to work on it. And sooner or later they will cast about for a profitable account to replace yours.

David Ogilvy
It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.

David Ogilvy
Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.

David Ogilvy
The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Try not to insult her intelligence.

David Ogilvy
A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

David Ogilvy
To advertisers: "Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?"

David Ogilvy
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?

David Ogilvy
I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good manners.

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
The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything.

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

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
Unless your campaign has a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.

David Ogilvy
As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?

David Ogilvy
The biggest problem which besets almost every agency is the problem of producing good campaigns. Copywriters, art directors, and television producers are easily come by, but the number of men who can preside over an agency's entire creative output - perhaps a hundred new campaigns every year - can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. These rare trumpeter swans must be capable of inspiring a motley crew of writers and artists; they must be sure-footed judges of campaigns for a wide range of different products; they must be good presenters; and they must have a colossal appetite for midnight oil.

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
The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.

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

David Ogilvy
If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.

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

David Ogilvy
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.

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
There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.

David Ogilvy