David Ogilvy

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

From the start I had my own ideas about how the business should run. I wanted it to benefit everybody who contributed to its success-stockholders, labor and the American public.

There is no failure except failure to serve one’s purpose.

In the Ford Motor Company we emphasize service equally with sales.

In the long run people are going to buy the cheapest and the best article no matter where it is made.

If you find out what men want and give them that, you are pleasing them. If you find out what is good for them and give them that, you are performing a service. That’s what we are trying to do.

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

Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman – not the attitude of the prospect.

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

No one should buy on reputation alone. They should come and see it and inspect it, feel it and touch it.

Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

A nation that knows how to work will never suffer.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public well has nothing to fear from the competition.

I always said that mega-mergers were for megalomaniacs.