Art & Creativity Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy’s feigned shrug at “the rules of grammar” is a salesman’s misdirection: he isn’t rejecting rigor, he’s rejecting the kind of rigor that flatters the writer instead of moving the reader. Coming from the patron saint of modern advertising, the line doubles as both an aesthetic stance and a power move. Grammar here stands in for every prestige code that signals class, education, and insider status. Ogilvy’s point is that those codes don’t just fail to persuade; they can actively repel, because they remind people they’re being talked at.

The intent is ruthlessly practical. Persuasion, in Ogilvy’s world, isn’t the art of sounding smart; it’s the craft of making an idea feel like the reader’s own thought arriving on schedule. “Use their language” is empathy with teeth: a demand that the writer surrender ego and inhabit the customer’s mental weather. The subtext is also slightly cynical. If people think in the language they “use every day,” then control the everyday language and you control the frame of choice. This is advertising’s quiet thesis: the shortest path to belief is familiarity.

Context matters: Ogilvy helped professionalize a mid-century industry that was shifting from circus-barker bombast to researched, conversational credibility. “Vernacular” becomes not a folksy flourish, but a technology of trust. He’s arguing for plainness as strategy, not purity - the kind of clarity that sells without announcing it’s selling.