David Ogilvy

“I'm supposed to be one of the most fertile inventors of big ideas, but in my long career, I have not had more than 20.”

“Disastrous consequences can arise when a founder pussyfoots in his day-to-day dealings with his business. It is better to say, what you have just shown me is not up to your usual high standard. Please take another crack at it. At the same time, you should expl…”

“My observation has been that mediocre men recognize genius, resent it, and feel compelled to destroy it. There are very few men of genius, but we need all we can find. Almost without exception, they are disagreeable. Do not destroy them. They lay golden eggs.”

“The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.”

“Unless your campaign 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.”

“Search all the parks in your cities. You'll find no statues of committees.”

“The majority of businessmen are incapable of original thinking because they're unable to escape from the tyranny of reason.”

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

“I have an inviolable rule against employing nepots and spouses because they breed politics. Whenever two of our people get married, one of them must depart.”

“For the next 17 years, while my friends were establishing themselves as doctors, lawyers, civil servants, and politicians, I adventured about the world, uncertain of my purpose. I was a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a social worker in the slums of Ed…”

“You are not advertising to a standing army. You are advertising to a moving parade. Three million customers get married every year. The advertisements which sold a refrigerator to a new married couple last year will work just as successful to those who get mar…”

“Clients who haggle over their agency's compensation are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of trying to shave a few measly cents off the agency's 15%, they should concentrate on getting more sales results from their 85% that they spend on …”

“The revenues of my 19 clients are now greater than the revenue of her majesty's government.”

“When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar. If you haven't done some selling in your headline, you have wasted 80% of your money. A change of headline can make a difference of 10 to one in sales.”

“I've come to the conclusion that the top man has one principal responsibility. To provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.”

“Researchers found that headlines of 10 words or longer consistently sold more merchandise than short headlines.”

“The difference between one advertisement and another when measured in terms of sales can be as much as 19 to one.”

“It's this idea that you have to keep open the telephone line to your unconscious. And you see this all the time, like, why do you have ideas, like, suddenly, like, a problem that you're, like, unconscious or even subconscious mind is, like, mulling over, you k…”

“One thing that he learned on how to run an organization that he learned from Stevenson is that to become a master of the terse memo. That's the exact word he used. Master of the terse memo. When you'd send something to his boss, right? When you send something …”

“If each of us hires people who are small, smaller than we are, we should 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.”

“Research cannot help you much in this domain because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea.”

“He's the best writer I've ever read for the podcast, by far.”

“In the absence of courage, nothing worthwhile can be accomplished. That's because anything on the cutting edge needs to be constantly fought for and defended.”

“Dogged determination is often the only trait That separates a moderately creative person from a highly creative one. That's because great work is never done by temperamental geniuses, but by obstinate donkey men.”

“I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principal responsibility. To provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work. To be successful, you must, out of necessity, accumulate a group of creative people. This probably means a…”

“The notion that bureaucratic sausage factories pumping out fodder for meetings will solve problems is ludicrous. Bureaucracy has no place in an ideas company.”

“We have a habit of divine discontent with our performance. It's an anecdote to smugness. So that idea is that you're always slightly discontent with the quality of your work, the quality of your company. You're always constantly trying to prove it.”

“All of our finest thoughts and best ideas are not the work of the logical mind, but gifts from the unconscious.”

“Most companies have a tyranny of politeness, which means we just lie to each other. We want to have a culture of candor.”

“I've come to regard advertising as part of the product to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard any more than you would stint on any other essential ingredient in your product, assumi…”

“David Ogilvie noticed a half a century ago that talent is likely to be found around, among nonconformist dissenters and rebels. And what happens is the corporate corporation grows. They kind of like even that out. They want like the middle and they miss all th…”

“Once you have an ad that works, stick to it. Stop changing it. Stop jumping around. They say this over and over again. You see people, modern day people make this mistake over and over again.”

“And David Overby said, essentially, like, he built the foundation for his giant advertising agency that he founded, just on the work alone of Claude Hopkins.”

“In fact, interesting enough, Buffett made more money on Ogilvy's company than Ogilvy did because Ogilvy got scared and sold his equity too early before it appreciated.”