David Ogilvy

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I suspect that many corporations have begun to understand that they have an important role to play in the lives of their communities, and that allocating funds to support local groups helps them discharge that function and also burnish their image.

Mr. Edison was comfortably well off-he was not a money maker.

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

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.

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.

Fairs and public displays are the best means we have yet found of showing large numbers of people the real methods of industry.

One client didn’t want to go out so had us build him a nightclub in his house.

Profits are not financial-they’re social. Everybody profits from industry. Politicians don’t understand profits because they can pay bills out of taxation.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn’t actually fall down.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.

I’ve been making deals all my life.

Listen – it makes you sound smarter.

The worst of times often create the best opportunities to make good deals.