David Ogilvy

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially – like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.

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.

The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.

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.

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place.

If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don’t let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else’s advertising.

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially – like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.

I’m not looking to be a personal manager.

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

The main job of the entrepreneur is to define the mission, find and inspire the team, and lead.

Acquiring the habit of note-taking is therefore a wonderfully complementary skill to that of listening.

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.

I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.

Depressions aren’t acts of God; like wars, they are the work of a small group of men who profit by them.

The art of effective listening is essential to clear communication, and clear communication is necessary to management success.

The way I run my business seems to be easier than the way I run my life.

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

No business can succeed in any great degree without being properly organized.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.