Success Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy’s line is a beautifully self-serving bit of professional diplomacy: it absolves advertising of guilt while keeping its authority intact. The wording stacks the deck. “Reflects” makes ads sound like mirrors - passive, almost innocent - while “mores” gives the subject a sociological sheen, as if consumer culture were an anthropologist’s field notes. Then comes the hard cutoff: “but it does not influence them.” Not “rarely,” not “in small ways,” but a clean moral firewall.

The intent is strategic. Ogilvy, the patron saint of modern Madison Avenue, needed advertising to be seen as a disciplined craft, not mass manipulation. In the postwar era of booming consumerism and growing anxiety about propaganda (fresh in memory after WWII, newly relevant in the Cold War), the industry was eager to distinguish persuasion from brainwashing. This sentence is a PR inoculation: if ads are merely responsive, then criticism about shaping gender roles, status anxiety, or political taste lands somewhere else.

The subtext is the real tell. Ogilvy is arguing for admakers as technicians serving demand, not engineers manufacturing desire. Yet the claim also flatters advertisers with omniscience: to “reflect the mores of society” you must first know them intimately, translate them instantly, and package them profitably. Even if you accept the premise, the feedback loop is obvious: repetition legitimizes. Ads don’t need to invent values to strengthen them, normalize them, and make them feel inevitable. Ogilvy’s denial works because it’s half-true in the safest way: advertising rides cultural currents, then helps decide which ones become tides.