Art & Creativity Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy doesn’t just complain; he stages a humiliation. Advertising, he insists, is built out of language, then he drags the industry’s supposed professionals into an arena where language is the entire game and shows them losing publicly. The Metropolitan Opera image is doing the heavy lifting: grand, expensive, high-prestige, and utterly unforgiving to the unprepared. By comparing bad copywriters and account people to “deaf mutes” on that stage, he isn’t arguing they’re merely unskilled; he’s saying they’re structurally unfit for the role they’ve been handed.

The intent is managerial and corrective, but the tone is acid because the target is an institutional complacency: agencies that sell persuasion while quietly tolerating internal illiteracy. “Plans” matters as much as “advertisements.” Ogilvy is calling out a two-layer failure: the inability to craft the message and the inability to explain, justify, and strategize it. In other words, not only can’t they perform; they can’t even articulate why they’re onstage.

Context sharpens the edge. Ogilvy’s era prized the “big idea” and the crafted headline; his own legend was built on disciplined copy and research-backed clarity. This is him defending a professional standard against the drift toward presentation theater, jargon, and meetings-as-output. The subtext is a warning to agencies chasing glamour: if you can’t write, you’re not in advertising, you’re in costume.