William Bernbach Quotes

53 quotes in 588 categories

• Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
• The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.
• Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn.
• 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...…
• In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.
• Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.
• In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.
• Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product.…
• 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…
• 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…
• A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.
• In advertising, not to be different is virtually suicidal.
• Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.
• Logic and over-analysis can immobilise and sterilize an idea. It's like love. The more you analyse it, the more it disappears.
• 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…
• If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic!
• There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules ... but there's one…
• If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some people against you. If you stand for nothing, you will…
• I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.
• Never do anything yourself that you can hire someone else to do, especially if they can do it better.

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