Quotes from David Ogilvy

I was infinitely more useful to my clients when I wrote copy than when I was Chairman of the Board.

Search the parks in all your cities You'll find no statues of committees

When you are appointed to head an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send you one of these Russian dolls. Inside the smallest you will find this message: '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, Ogilvy & Mather will become a company of giants.' With

Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it… Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.

Sales are a function of product-value and advertising. Promotions cannot produce more than a temporary kink in the sales curve.

However able they may be, ambitious people won't stay in outfits which practice nepotism. This is one mistake I did not make; my son is in the real estate business, secure in the knowledge that he owes nothing of his success to his father. Think

It is usually assumed that marketers use scientific methods to determine the price of their products. Nothing could be further from the truth. In almost every case, the process of decision is one of guesswork.

Whatever you do, for goodness sake, don't change the name of your corporation to initials.

Tell your prospective client what your weak points are, before he notices them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points. Don

People don't think what they feel, don't say what they think and don't do what they say.

All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short.

Do you think it childish to use a set of written principles to guide the management of an advertising agency? I can only tell you that mine have proved invaluable in keeping a complicated enterprise on course. Profit

Agencies add new services the way universities add new courses. Nothing wrong with that if you also discontinue services which have outlived their relevance. To keep your boat moving through the water, keep scraping the barnacles off its bottom. Seven

Many security analysts still believe that agencies are a poor investment. Not so Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in the world. He has taken substantial positions in three publicly held agencies, and is quoted as saying, 'The best business is a royalty on the growth of others, requiring very little capital itself … such as the top international advertising agencies.' If

In my Confessions, I told how I started by making a list of the clients I most wanted – General Foods, Lever Brothers, Bristol Myers, Campbell Soup Company and Shell. It took time, but in due course I got them all, plus American Express, Sears Roebuck, IBM, Morgan Guaranty, Merrill Lynch and a few others, including

The best way to settle such arguments is to measure the selling effectiveness of your campaign at regular intervals, and to go on running it until the research shows that it has worn out. Word

If you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they are found in oak forests.

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.

Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that's the way to answer them – not by arguments around the table.

Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement,' said Samuel Johnson.

Given sufficient training, any intelligent person can learn to conduct surveys, but getting people to use the results requires salesmanship of a high order.

St Augustine had this to say about pressure: 'To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world: war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures, and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendor. But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure, but does not complain. For it is the friction which polishes him. It is pressure which refines and makes him noble.

A posture of enthusiasm is not always the one best calculated to succeed.

Search all he parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees.