Success Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy is doing something rare for an ad man: admitting the scoreboard is rigged. “Bigness” reads like the natural habitat of modern business - scale, market share, budget, headlines, the comforting illusion that growth equals virtue. It’s the kind of goal investors can count and boards can applaud without needing to understand the work. By contrast, “excellence” is stubbornly hard to quantify; it shows up in craft, taste, and the long game, the stuff that doesn’t always spike a quarterly report.

The sentence works because it refuses moral purity. Ogilvy doesn’t pretend excellence is the most “successful” path. He concedes profitability to bigness, which makes the second clause land harder: satisfaction isn’t a consolation prize, it’s a different currency. The subtext is both a warning and a permission slip. A warning that organizations will drift toward the measurable - bigger campaigns, more clients, more awards, more noise - even if the product gets blander. A permission slip for anyone inside the machine who suspects the real payoff is pride in the work, not dominance.

Context matters: Ogilvy built one of the great agencies of the 20th century, a period when mass media rewarded scale and the “big idea” could blanket entire nations. He knew exactly how profitable bigness could be, and his point is almost confessional: if you chase growth alone, you may win the market and lose the plot.