What I Learned From the Most Successful Advertising Agency Executive in History

David Ogilvy is truly one of the GOATs of marketing and advertising, having worked with many of the world’s biggest brands as he built one of the world’s most successful advertising agencies with over 100 offices and almost $6B in revenue.

The guy has probably sold more stuff than anyone in the world.

Here are the 11 David Ogilvy quotes that had the biggest impact on the way I think about marketing.

1) “The difference between one advertisement and another, when measured in terms of sales, can be as much as nineteen to one"

2) “Unless your advertising is built on a BIG IDEA it will pass like a ship in the night”

3) “Big ideas are usually simple ideas.”

4) “It pays to boil down your strategy to one simple promise and go the whole hog in delivering that promise”

5) “Every headline should appeal to the reader’s self-interest”

6) “Most manufacturers are reluctant to accept any limitation on the image of their brand. They want it to be all things to all people. They want their brand to be a male brand and a female brand. An upper -class brand and a plebeian brand. They generally end up with a brand which has no personality of any kind, a wishy-washy neuter. No capon ever rules the roost.”

7) “It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to “come up with something new” every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image, and the stability to stick with it over a long period.”

8) “You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who’ll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.

9) “The most important decision is how to position your product.”

10) “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”

11) “Shakespeare wrote his sonnets with a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote sonatas within an equally rigid discipline – exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?”

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