David Ogilvy

Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don’t live up to them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second rate work.

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.

Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

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

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

The other people I don’t take too seriously are the critics-except when they stand in the way of my projects. In my opinion, they mostly write to impress each other, and they’re just as swayed by fashions as anyone else. One week it’s spare glass towers they are praising to the skies. The next week, they’ve rediscovered old, and they’re celebrating detail and ornamentation.

We decided not to show One Hyde Park til we were 100% ready. A lot of people open the doors too early.

I don’t know the rules of grammar. If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

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.

They encouraged me to always look for the good in people instead of assuming the worst and trying to find fault.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Oprah.

I don’t know the exact details of his background but from what I have read Mr. Abramovich had a very humble start in life and has made his own luck.

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.

The more predictable the business, the more valuable it is.

An imitation may be quite successful in its own way, but imitation can never be Success. Success is a first-hand creation.

It was always my practice to train salespeople under my direct supervision, and to treat children with the utmost consideration.

The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up.

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.

My definition of an executive’s job is brief and to the point. It is simply this: Getting things done through other people.