| The ultimate test of a finished account executive is his ability to write a sound marketing plan. | Morris Hite |
| Advertising is, actually, a simple phenomenon in terms of economics. It is merely a substitute for a personal sales force - an extension, if you will, of the merchant who cries aloud his wares. | Rosser Reeve |
| The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself. | Leo Burnett |
| A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain't got nothin'. | Leo Burnett |
| Hollywood has its Oscars. Television has its Emmys. Broadway has its Tonys. And advertising has its Clios. And its Andys, Addys, Effies and Obies. And 117 other assorted awards. And those are just the big ones. | Joanne Lipman |
| If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic. | William Bernbach |
| To many advertising account executives, chronic nervous dyspepsia, psychosomatic tension, and hyperacidity are more than just medical words used in television commercials. These are the very real terms that describe what is probably the most common occupational disease of the advertising game. | Harry R. Gasker |
| Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century. | Marshall McLuhan |
| Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. | George Orwell |
| Advertising is a ten billion dollar a year misunderstanding with the public. | Chester L. Posey |
| No agency is better than its account executives. | Morris Hite |
| Advertising is of the very essence of democracy. An election goes on every minute of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which manufacturer and which product shall be the leader today, and which shall lead tomorrow. | Bruce Barton |
| If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all. | Leo Burnett |
| It's called advertising, not minusvertising. | Stephen Freeman |
| Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising. | David Ogilvy |
| Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed . . . but dull? | William Bernbach |
| Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it. | Leo Burnett |
| Different groups are differentially vulnerable to advertising; and their vulnerability varies not so much with the character or quantity of advertisements as with the informational resources they can claim by age, education, station in life, and government guarantees of consumer protection. | Michael Schudson |
| Advertising is found in societies which have passed the point of satisfying the basic animal needs. | Marion Harper, Jnr |
| The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf. | Marshall McLuhan |
| Advertising is legalized lying. | H.G. Wells |
| Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats. | Northrop Frye |
| Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. | Stephen Butler Leacock |
| The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced. | Daniel J. Boorstin |
| It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them. Many clients are surrounded by buckpassers who make a fine art of blaming the agency for their own failures. I seize the earliest opportunity to assume the blame. | David Ogilvy |
| I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I have a previous engagement with another client; successful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach. | David Ogilvy |
| To advertisers: Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself? | David Ogilvy |
| Most agencies run scared, most of the time. . . . Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising. . . . If I were a client, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts. | David Ogilvy |
| If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art. | Michael Schudson |
| I regard a great ad as the most beautiful thing in the world. | Leo Burnett |
| Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by the beauty of the picture - and forget that merchandise must be sold. | James Randolph Adams |
| Advertising is the lubricant for the free-enterprise system. | Leo Arthur Kelmenson |
| I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death. | Leo Burnett |
| The more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement's chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases. | Dr. Charles Edwards |
| Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you. Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before. | William Bernbach |
| Advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news it is worthless. | Adolph S. Ochs |
| There is no such thing as 'soft sell' and 'hard sell.' There is only 'smart sell' and 'stupid sell'. | Charles Browder |
| What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it. | David Ogilvy |
| What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form. | David Ogilvy |
| On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. | David Ogilvy |
| Words give you a medium, if you will, and make your message part of the human thought process. Words are as portable as the human being who hears them. | James J. Jordan, Jnr |
| I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. | David Ogilvy |
| Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them. | David Ogilvy |
| A man who is hungry need never be told of his need for food. If he is inspired by his appetite, he is immune to the influence of Messrs. Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. The latter are effective only with those who are so far removed from physical want that they do not already know what they want. | John Kenneth Galbraith |
| Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility. | Joseph Conrad |
| It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen. | William Bernbach |
| The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly. | Leo Burnett |
| When you try to formalize or socialize creative activity, the only sure result is commercial constipation. The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups. | Charles Browder |
| I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good manners. | David Ogilvy |
| I have learned that trying to guess what the boss or the client wants is the most debilitating of all influences in the creation of good advertising. | Leo Burnett |
| The most dangerous thing that can happen to us, I think, is to permit a feeling to develop that any client is a problem. I have always taken the attitude that no account is a 'problem account' but that all accounts have important problems attached to them - that you can waste more time and burn up more nervous energy by fighting a problem than by taking a positive attitude and solving it. It sure gives you a nice, warm glow when you do | Leo Burnett |
| It is very likely that many firms spend more on advertising than, for their own best interests, they should. | Michael Schudson |
| To Mrs. Mufoosky, the commercials may seem as long as a whore's dream. But to the new advertiser who has spent 100 Gs for his first network commercial - he gets a new understanding of a split second. It's the fastest half minute of his lifetime. | Morris Hite |
| The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships. | Leo Burnett |
| Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people. | Leo Burnett |
| Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten. | William Bernbach |
| Properly practiced creativity MUST result in greater sales more economically achieved. Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent. | William Bernbach |
| In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal. | William Bernbach |
| I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement . . . . It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public. | Aldous Huxley |
| Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read. | Leo Burnett |
| The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to give it memory value. | Morris Hite |
| That is the kind of ad I like. Facts, facts, facts. | Samuel Goldwyn |
| The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. | Louis Kronenberger |
| You must make the product interesting, not just make the ad different. And that's what too many of the copywriters in the U.S. today don't yet understand | Rosser Reeves |
| To establish a favorable and well-defined brand personality with the consumer the advertiser must be consistent. You can't use a comic approach today and a scientist in a white jacket tomorrow without diffusing and damaging your brand personality. | Morris Hite |
| Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement. | Samuel Johnson |
| The right name is an advertisement in itself. | Claude C. Hopkins |
| The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife. | David Ogilvy |
| Different groups are differentially vulnerable to advertising; and their vulnerability varies not so much with the character or quantity of advertisements as with the informational resources they can claim by age, education, station in life, and government guarantees of consumer protection. | Michael Schudson |
| Advertising is found in societies which have passed the point of satisfying the basic animal needs. | Marion Harper, Jnr |
| I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive. | David Ogilvy |
| To think that the effects of advertising, such a potent environment in any industrialized country, could be limited to economics, is as absurd as assuming that the effects of a hot climate upon a culture could be limited to tropical diseases. | William Kuhns |
| Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. | Sinclair Lewis |
| I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half. | John Wanamaker |
| There is more money wasted in advertising by underspending than by overspending. Years ago someone said that underspending in advertising is like buying a ticket halfway to Europe. You've spent your money but you never get there. | Morris Hite |
| Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are enemies of freedom. | J. Enoch Powell |
| It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. | Jerome K. Jerome |
| The business of the advertiser or the seller is not to create fundamentally new desires. That is not necessary and really cannot be done. Man already has certain desires present from birth, which are a part of his fundamental make-up. All that a seller can do is to direct these desires in certain directions, or stimulate them to action, or show by what new ways an old desire may be satisfied. | Daniel Starch |
| Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief. | Leo Burnett |
| Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted. | John Kenneth Galbraith |
| The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men - the man he is and the man he wants to be. | William Feather |
| If you are writing about baloney, don't try to make it Cornish hen, because that is the worst kind of baloney there is. Just make it darned good baloney. | Leo Burnett |
| I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one. | Leo Burnett |
| No, I don't think a 68-year-old copywriter . . . can write with the kids. That he's as creative. That he's as fresh. But he may be a better surgeon. His ad may not be quite as fresh and glowing as the Madison Ave. fraternity would like to see it be, and yet he might write an ad that will produce five times the sales. And that's the name of the game, isn't it? | Rosser Reeves |
| The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in a letter or told to an acquaintance. | George P. Rowell |
| I think central to good writing of advertising, or anything else, is a person who has developed an understanding of people, an insight into them, a sympathy toward them. I think that that develops more sharply when the writer has not had an easy adjustment to living. So that they have themselves felt the need for understanding, the need for sympathy, and can therefore see that need in other people. | George Gribbin |
| A writer should be joyous, an optimist . . . Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer. | George Gribbin |
| I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than it is to write a good ad. | Leo Burnett |
| Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull? | David Ogilvy |
| I don't know the rules of grammar. . . . If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular. | David Ogilvy |
| I did not feel 'evil' when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years. | David Ogilvy |
| Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things. | David Ogilvy |
| Advertising is an instrument in the hands of the people who use it. If evil men use advertising for base purposes, then evil can result. If honest men use advertising to sell an honest product with honest enthusiasm, then positive good for our kind of capitalistic society can result. | John W. Crawford |
| Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health. | Rodney A. Smoll |
| Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising. | Calvin Coolidge |
| Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to initiate them. | Michael Schudson |
| I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product. | David Ogilvy |
| Contrary to what self-appointed protectors of the consumer so loudly proclaim, advertising does not cause people to buy bad products. Nothing will put a bad product out of business faster than a good advertising campaign. Advertising causes people to try a product once, but poor quality eliminates any possibility of a repeat purpose. | Morris Hite |
| Is advertising moral? It is part and parcel of the American free enterprise system? I challenge anybody to show any economic system that has done as much for so many in so short a time. | Morris Hite |
| The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercized in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions. | Dr. Samuel Johnson |
