David Ogilvy Quotes

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

You can't test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre. Not that I don't care about demographics. You have to understand who you're going after.

Advertisements ordinarily work their wonders, to the extent that they work at all, on an inattentive public.

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.

If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.

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

I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.

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

Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.

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'.

We have always said that advertising is just the icing on the cake. It is not the cake.

You put choice on the table, you change the whole game. Everything is about control. If an ad is interesting to you, you'll have the conversation with the brand. If it's not, it's a waste of time.

You have to make people feel things. I think that's what commercials are, from a commercial for a car, a phone or anything that might be, they want to do it. The first iPhone was sold by how exciting it was to hold pictures of your family, not how great a phone it was.

Great advertising triggers an emotion in you. It has purpose. It touches a nerve, and that provokes a reaction.

The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.

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

They know they got the TV ad, they know they got the name recognition, they know that they can do a tie in with McDonald's or some fast food outlet and the money is just gonna flow in.

Any conversations we hear about 'So who are Pearl Jam marketing to?' are despicable.

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.

We all need to become more customer-focused and recognize the power of marketing to sell more diamonds.

When you invest in high-quality brands, it pays off with high-quality audiences and, ultimately, high-quality advertising rates.

I've done a pretty good job of hitting 18-34-year-old males, and not such a good job of reaching kids. Disney has done a great job of reaching kids, but maybe not the 18-34-year-olds. I figure I can learn a lot from Disney, and maybe, I don't know, they can learn a lot from me.

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.

Great advertising, in and of itself, becomes a benefit of the product.

It's kind of debatable whether or not the advertisement model is effective. Like whether Nielsen works.