Marriage Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy’s line lands like a moral slap in a profession built to make you forget you’re being handled. He takes advertising - often defended as “just persuasion” - and drags it back into the realm of personal honor. The brilliance is the bait-and-switch: he starts with the safe, almost wholesome benchmark (“your family”), then tightens the screws by invoking the most intimate audit possible: your spouse. That move isn’t sentimental; it’s strategic. If you can’t pass the at-home test, you don’t deserve to pass the marketplace.

The kicker, “Don’t tell them to mine,” is classic Ogilvy: a businessman borrowing the cadence of a street-level warning. It reframes the consumer not as a target but as someone’s partner, someone’s household. The subtext is both ethical and pragmatic. Ethically, he’s arguing that lying in copy is a form of social vandalism, corroding trust one claim at a time. Pragmatically, he’s implying that deception is bad business because it’s short-term thinking: it sells once, then poisons the brand relationship and, eventually, the category.

Context matters: Ogilvy built his reputation on research-heavy, results-obsessed advertising that still prized credibility. This quote reads like an internal memo meant to discipline the craft. Not because he’s squeamish about commerce, but because he understands the real product of advertising isn’t the ad - it’s belief.