The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
DAVID OGILVYThe best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
DAVID OGILVYNever 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.
DAVID OGILVYAdvertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
DAVID OGILVYGood copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.
DAVID OGILVYOn 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.
DAVID OGILVYFirst, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.
DAVID OGILVYDevelop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won’t think you’re going gaga.
DAVID OGILVYThere is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.
DAVID OGILVYRemove 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.
DAVID OGILVYI 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.
DAVID OGILVYThe secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
DAVID OGILVYSome manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.
DAVID OGILVYWhat really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
DAVID OGILVYIt is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.
DAVID OGILVYI do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.
DAVID OGILVYAdvertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.
DAVID OGILVY