15 Fantastic quotes by David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy is a legend within the advertising business, he was brilliant creative, admired for his style and management technique which lifted the advertising business.

Through his fantastic career, Mr Ogilvy created some ground breaking campaigns, which today can be studied in text books all over the world.

I strongly encourage everybody who works with sales and marketing, would benefit from reading the fantastic and timeless book, Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy.

Besides the outstanding campaigns, is Mr Ogilvy acknowledged for his management style and writing. He made several very interesting statements, which today still is spectacular and worth some consideration for entrepreneurs, business owners and sales and marketing executives.

1. “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”
2. “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.”
3. “Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.”
4. “Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.”
5. “Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.”
6. “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.”
7. “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”
8. “If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.”
9. “Why should a manufacturer bet his money, perhaps the future of his company, on your instinct?”
10. “Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.”
11. “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”
12. “It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look, and read.”
13. “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.”
14. “Consumers [decide] to buy or not to buy [based on] the content of your advertising, not its form.”
15. “Training should not be confined to trainees. It should be a continuous process, and should include the entire professional staff of the agency. The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients”

I hope you find these quotes interesting and useful. Keep them in the back of your mind, they will come in handy when you are looking to recruite (quote 2), motivate (quote 1), implement tactics (quote 7) or consider strategy (quote 5).

If you search the web, who can find much related information, which is worth spending some time on.

Enjoy!