David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy
David Mackenzie Ogilvy CBEwas an advertising executive who was widely hailed as "The Father of Advertising". In 1962, Time called him "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry". He founded Ogilvy & Mather...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth23 June 1911
memorable brilliant ifs
If you can’t be brilliant, at least be memorable
office people curiosity
When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: 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.
mean smell atmosphere
Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. 'Standing room only' creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure.
wife favors trends
there are now unmistakeable signs of a trend in favor of superior products at premium prices. The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.
discipline three development
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?.
writing college advertising
Claude Hopkins.. maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock.
ideas conscious process
Nobody ever arrives at a very big idea through a conscious, rational thought process. It comes from your unconscious.
writing thinking people
People who think well, write well
achievement grows products
You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.
thinking two giving
Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it's Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniel's. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images
running agency giving
Most agencies run scared, most of the time. . . .Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising. . . . If I were aclient, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts.
men original-thought majority
The majority of business men are not capable of an original thought, simply because they cannot escape the tyranny of reason.
running dream morning
I was doing a campaign once for a manufacturer, and I couldn't think of an ideas, and I was kind of desperate about it. The night before I had to show something to my client I had a dream, an interesting dream. I woke up and for once in my life I wrote it down and went back to sleep Next morning I went to the office and had that dream out into a TV commercial which is still running thirty years after and which has made that particular product the leader in its field.
failure cereal eight
Why do eight out of ten new consumer products fail? Sometimes because they are too new. The first cold cereals were rejected by consumers. More often new products fail because they are not new enough.