David Ogilvy

Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.

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.

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.

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

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.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

I remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo! I remember thinking, ‘Maybe someday we’ll build a company. This probably isn’t it, but one day we will.’

A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public well has nothing to fear from the competition.

Nations are great as they are prosperous as they are industrious as they are just.

Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place.

We pay attention to every demographic in every country, so we’re going to focus on building things that teens are going to like, and we’re also going to focus on building things that other folks are going to like.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

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.

When prices go up, business goes down.

Not everybody is some kind of media model.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

We get real results only in proportion to the real values we give.