David Ogilvy

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

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.

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.

Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.

There 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.

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.

Success will always be measured by the extent to which we serve the buying public.

…capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.

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.

If the boss stands in the way of men getting what they earn, he is not fit to be boss.

My advice to budding property developers: do it on the cheap and you’ll get a cheap price. Don’t avoid putting in skirting just because it’s hidden by a sofa.

To be most effective in sales today, it’s imperative to drop your ‘sales’ mentality and start working with your prospects as if they’ve already hired you.

Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.

Money will ruin the life of any man who treats it like anything but a tool with which to work.

I may be kindly, I am ordinarily gentle, but in my line of business I am obliged to will terribly what I will at all.

While several parties have expressed interest in buying the company, I’m not shopping it, I haven’t sold it and I’m not about to sell it.

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

What right have you, save service to the world, to think that other men’s labor should contribute to your gains?

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

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.

It is always the start that requires the greatest effort.