David Ogilvy

It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.

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

Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.

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.

I have a theory that the best advertisements come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left. It’s totally dishonest.

A monopoly of jobs in this country is just as bad as a monopoly of bread!

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

I 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.

If I had to think where I could live if not Moscow, London would be my first choice and second would be New York.

Every business is a monarchy with, not a man, but an idea as king.

[On Calvin Klein asking him ‘Why don’t you call it Geffen Records?’] People in the record business just don’t do that. They come up with names likes Asylum, Capricorn, or Island. [Calvin Klein said if you put your own name on the door ‘You’ll get laid more.’]

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

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

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

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

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.

There are good examples of companies – Coca-Cola is one – that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

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