The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.
Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.
If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.
Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.
Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.
There is one catagory of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections.
Leaders grasp nettles.
Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.
We all have a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost – for support, but not for illumination.
Unless your campaign has a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.
If you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.
Creativity Is a fancy word for the work we have to do by Friday.
Write the way you talk. Naturally.
The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
The temptation to entertain instead of selling is contagious.
Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.
Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.
If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out – either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time.