David Ogilvy Quotes

Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.

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

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain't got nothin'.

It is not the purpose of the ad or commercial to make the reader or listener say, 'My what a clever ad.' It is the purpose of advertising to make the reader say, 'I believe I'll buy one when I'm shopping tomorrow'.

I showed what I can do with butter, right? Eighty-five percent increase in sales. I'm very proud of them Country Life ads. They were funny and clever and classy like the Toblerone ads I grew up with.

Advertising is a wonderful lubricant for business, if it's used properly.

Everything is designed to help you sell out.

Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can't.

Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret... to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by the beauty of the picture - and forget that merchandise must be sold.

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.

There was a period of time in America where the advertising world actually went to the housewives of America and had them write jingles that would appeal to them. It was actually brilliant marketing.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

Writing good ads is easy when you have something to say.

I understand the concept of advertising. It makes sense. Companies want to reach customers with information about their products. It's a completely legitimate and valuable notion.

The ingredients for great advertising haven't changed since the 'Mad Men' era: Brands win if their advertising is relevant and people like it.

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.

If you want to promote anything, all the work that you put into it is basically promoting the idea of it so that people will go for it. And if they don't go for it, you can't institute it. You can't do it.

I was always curious why certain marketing worked and some marketing did not.

You have to prove that the Freberg way will sell their product better than if they just did straight advertising. Whenever I give a lecture or seminar, that's what I try to get across to people. I hear very few radio commercials that sound like I could have written them or that they got the idea.

Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising.

If you have a great product but no one knows about it, it's history.