Quotes from David Ogilvy

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

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

Madison Avenue is full of masochists who unconsciously provoke rejection by their clients. I know brilliant men who have lost every account they have ever handled.

Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on.

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

Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.

If you can't advertise yourself, what hope do you have of advertising anything else?

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.

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

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

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

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.

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

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.

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.

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

Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

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

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

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.

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

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.

Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You've got to believe in the product.