Success Quote by David Ogilvy

Coming from David Ogilvy - the patron saint of modern advertising craft - this is less a moral lecture than a provocation from inside the machine. Ogilvy spent his career arguing that persuasion can be disciplined: know the product, respect the consumer, prove your claims. Political ads, he suggests, blow up that bargain. They sell a candidate the way you sell a detergent, except the "product" is unverifiable until after Election Day, and the cost of disappointment is public life, not a bad purchase.

The bite in "ought to be stopped" is deliberately authoritarian: a man famous for maximizing message efficiency suddenly calls for banning a whole category of messages. That overreach is the point. He is shaming an industry that hides behind free speech while exploiting the one market where accountability is weakest. A cereal ad can be tested, regulated, and punished by consumers in a week. A political ad can distort, insinuate, and disappear into the fog of partisanship, then get replaced by a new slogan before facts catch up.

"Only really dishonest" is also strategic nostalgia. Ogilvy isn't claiming commercial advertising is pure; he is drawing a line between exaggeration within guardrails and propaganda untethered from consequences. In the late 20th century, as TV spots became more negative and consultants professionalized campaigning, he saw his own tools redeployed for cynicism: not to inform choice but to manufacture mistrust. The repetition of "dishonest" reads like a creative director banging the table - not because he's naive about persuasion, but because he knows exactly how well it works.