Success Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy’s most revealing move here is the scare-quoted “evil,” a tiny typographic shrug that treats moral criticism as melodrama. He’s not arguing that advertising is virtuous; he’s arguing that the very idea of applying moral language to his work is category error. The line reads like a preemptive defense against the lingering suspicion that persuasion is, at bottom, manipulation. Ogilvy answers with a pragmatist’s alibi: results.

The intent is reputational triage. By shifting the conversation from means to outcomes - industry, tourists, economic uplift - he reframes the ad man as a development worker in a suit. It’s smart rhetoric because it borrows the moral authority of hunger and “starvation” to launder commercial intent. Few critics want to be the person sneering at jobs when the alternative is poverty. That’s the subtext: if you condemn my copy, you’re condemning progress.

Context matters, and it cuts both ways. Midcentury Puerto Rico was marketed, literally, as modernity-in-the-tropics: Operation Bootstrap, U.S.-backed industrialization, a deliberate rebranding campaign to attract capital and visitors. Ogilvy’s claim of “a country… for 400 years” compresses colonial history into a blunt justification, eliding the uncomfortable question of who benefits when a place is packaged for outsiders. “Helped attract” is also carefully passive: he’s a facilitator, not a power broker.

The line works because it turns advertising’s most suspect quality - its ability to shape desire - into a public-service instrument, while quietly asking us to accept that selling a story about Puerto Rico is the same as improving Puerto Rico.