David Ogilvy Quotes on Advertising (23 Quotes)

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.

Experience has taught me that advertisers get the best results when they pay their agency a flat fee. It is unrealistic to expect your agency to be impartial when its vested interest lies wholly in the direction of increasing your commissionable advertising.

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

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

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

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.

At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. (1958 Rolls-Royce print ad - sometimes referred to as the most famous headline in advertising history.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product.

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

Managing an advertising agency isn't all beer and skittles. After fourteen years of it, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.

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.

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

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.

There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs.

Most agencies run scared, most of the time... Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising... If I were a client, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

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.

There is one category of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections.