David Ogilvy

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.

The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.

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

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose… the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

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

Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don’t live up to them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second rate work.

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

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.

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.

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.

People in the beauty community don’t like copycats, so I think it’s important to stay true to who you are and people will stay your customer.

We were all young and we were all inventing our careers. I was very close to Jackson, just as I’d been very close to Laura Nyro. With each person I had a unique relationship.

Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence.

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

Success will always be measured by the extent to which we serve the buying public.

It is regrettable that people think about our monetary system, and of our economic structure, only in times of depression.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

Efficient industry is the sole key to prosperity.

Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.

I decided to sit quietly and do business and don’t stick your neck out and tell everybody everything belongs to me. That would only cause problems for myself. Therefore I never told these stories or declared all these things to anyone.

You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it’s not that way at all, it’s something else.