Quotes from David Ogilvy

I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.

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.

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

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

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

Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.

I always said that mega-mergers were for megalomaniacs.

My motto has always been: Only first class business and that in a first class way

You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.

The consumer is not a moron she is your wife.

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

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.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

Claude Hopkins.. maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock.

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

Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.

Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by.

Creativity needs discipline and freedom.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

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

The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife.

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.