top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Advertising quotes
"There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past."
"Advertising is what you do when you can't go see somebody. That's all it is."
"I promised to have no partisan affiliation and no subsidy except advertising."
"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."
"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
"Any seeming deception in a statement is costly, not only in the expense of the advertising but in the detrimental effect produced upon the customer, who believes she has been misled."
"The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague."
"Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy."
"I have learned that you can't have good advertising without a good client, that you can't keep a good client without good advertising, and no client will ever buy better advertising than he understands or has an appetite for."
Explore more quotes by David Ogilvy
"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."
"Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous."
"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 have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive."
"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 takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea."
"If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants."
"Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals."
"Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga."
"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."
bottom of page