Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination. "

David Ogilvy

Judgment

Research

Support

Related Quotes:

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

" I did not feel 'evil' when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years. "

" Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga. "

" It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy. "

David Ogilvy

Advertising

Own

" The headline is the 'ticket on the meat.' Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising. "

" Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped. "

" If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising. "

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

" Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous. "

David Ogilvy

Results

Experience

" 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. "

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

" It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye. "

David Ogilvy

Eye

Dinner

" Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising. "

" In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. "

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

David Ogilvy

Advertising

Say

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

" I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular. "

David Ogilvy

Language

Think

" 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. "

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

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

" I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes. "

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

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

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