David Ogilvy

The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.

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.

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.

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.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out — either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don’t think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.

No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn’t.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

I have no Napoleonic dream. I’m just hard-working and pragmatic.

I believe in trusting men, not only once but twice – in giving a failure another chance.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

Listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.

[To his ex-entertainment lawyer Eric Eisner who resigned from the presidency of The David Geffen Company in 1991 just as a deal was about to be made with some Japanese] Keep your stock. [Eric sold it.]

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.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

Investors are visionaries in some respects – they look beyond the present.

If your dreams don’t scare you they are too small.

I never trust an executive who tends to pass the buck. Nor would I want to deal with him as a customer or a supplier.

I always said that mega-mergers were for megalomaniacs.

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.

The well-satisfied customer will bring the repeat sale that counts.