 Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga. |
| Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon. |
| In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. |
| I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. |
| Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative. |
| What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form. |
| Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals. |
| Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. |
| It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy. |
| Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write. |
| It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. |
| Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous. |
| The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account. |
| It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye. |
| What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it. |
| Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything. |
