An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
Fred Allen
Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.
Aristotle
Those who are blessed with the most talent don't necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
Mary Kay Ash
A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one.
Mary Kay Ash
Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’
Mary Kay Ash
Advertising is like learning – a little is a dangerous thing. If a man has not the pluck to keep on advertising, all the money he has already spent is lost.
P.T. Barnum
The real advertising writer who is after results makes the reader want something – and then provides what the reader will consider a good excuse for buying it.
Clyde Bedell
Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent.
William Bernbach
Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.
William Bernbach
The heart of creativity is discipline.
William Bernbach
The memorable never emerged from a formula.
William Bernbach
The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.
William Bernbach
Execution isn’t a vehicle for delivering a selling message. It is a selling message.
William Bernbach
There are two motives to action: self-interest and fear.
Napoleon Bonaparte
There’s mass mediocrity in every business. The trouble is, in advertising the whole world sees it.
Bill Borders
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
Steuart H. Britt
There is no such thing as ‘soft sell’ and ‘hard sell.’ There is only ‘smart sell’ and ‘stupid sell.
Charles Browder
A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
Warren Buffett
75% of the benefit of advertising, is that you advertise.
Jeremy Bullmore
When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.
Leo Burnett
If you can’t turn yourself into a consumer, you probably shouldn’t be in the advertising business at all.
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
Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.
Leo Burnett
People aren’t interested in you. They’re interested in themselves.
Dale Carnegie
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
Dale Carnegie
Dickens didn't write what people wanted; he wanted what people wanted.
G.K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
G.K. Chesterton
Sometimes the most important job advertising can do, is to clarify the obvious.
Jay Chiat
The real secret of success is enthusiasm.
Walter P. Chrysler
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
Winston Churchill
We have become so accustomed to hearing everyone claim that his product is the best in the world, or the cheapest, that we take all such statements with a grain of salt.
Robert Collier
Playing safe is probably the most unsafe thing in the world. You cannot stand still. You must go forward.
Robert Collier
Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.
Robert Collier
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word.
Joseph Conrad
Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming
How dismal is progress without publicity.
Theodore Dreiser
The passions are the only advocates which invariably persuade.
Theodore Dreiser
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
Thomas A. Edison
There are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.
Thomas A. Edison
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein
A required change never has unanimity of support, and by the time it does, it’s usually too late.
Carly Fiorina
A little bad makes the good believable.
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin
We don't want to be something for everybody, we want to be everything for some people.
Carlos Ghosn
A concept is stronger than a fact.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
People don’t read advertising, they read what interests them. Sometimes, it’s an ad.
Howard Gossage
I don’t know how to speak to everybody, only to somebody.
Howard Gossage
Explaining makes for lousy marketing.
Dan Heath
You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.
Theodore Hesburgh
Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can’t.
Morris Hite
In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. ”
Lee Iacocca
Originality is undetected plagiarism.
William Ralph Inge
Advertisements contain the only truth to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Erica Jong
Advertising is Salesmanship in Print.
John E. Kennedy
Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.
Milan Kundera
Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
Ray Kroc
If you don’t sell, it’s not the product that’s wrong, it’s you.
Estee Lauder
If you can go from a big idea to a big ideal; if you can tap into a cultural truth; if you can tap into something in which society is wildly interested in at the moment, you have a huge opportunity.
Shelly Lazarus
If you don’t believe in your product, or if you’re not consistent and regular in the way you promote it, the odds of succeeding go way down.
Jay Conrad Levinson
People will buy anything that is ‘one to a customer.
Sinclair Lewis
Creativity can solve almost any problem.
George Lois
If you wish others to believe in you, you must first convince them that you believe in them.
Harvey Mackay
Don't confuse visibility with credibility.
Harvey Mackay
The sale begins when the customer says yes.
Harvey Mackay
Imagination is one of the last remaining legal means you have to gain an unfair advantage over your competition.
Ed McCabe
Selling is an art of passion. When you’re passionate about an idea, it shows.
Tom McElligott
All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.
Marshall McLuhan
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Marshall McLuhan
Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.
Marshall McLuhan
Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer.
Marilyn Monroe
Only the public can make a star. It’s the studios who try to make a ‘system’ out of it.
Marilyn Monroe
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Marilyn Monroe
Brands never die. You only stop reinventing them.
Indra Nooyi
Every advertisement must be considered as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.
David Ogilvy
The manufacturers who dedicate their advertising to building the most favorable image, the most sharply defined personality for their brands, are the ones who will get the largest share of those markets at the highest profit – in the long run.
David Ogilvy
You cannot bore people into buying your product.
David Ogilvy
The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.
David Ogilvy
Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.
David Ogilvy
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
The secret of all true persuasion is to induce the person to persuade himself.
Harry Overstreet
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
Pablo Picasso
Copy is a direct conversation with the consumer.
Shirley Polykoff
You can’t write anything while you’re depressed. You have to stimulate yourself, and I don’t mean liquor. That only makes you dopey.
Shirley Polykoff
You generate better when you think you’re gorgeous.
Shirley Polykoff
(I’m) just an articulate consumer in the client’s offices.
Shirley Polykoff
Let’s try honesty.
John E. Powers
The consumer tends to remember just one thing from advertising – one strong claim, or one strong concept.
Rosser Reeves
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
What do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?
Rosser Reeves
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 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
Resist the usual.
Raymond Rubicam
Mirror the reader to himself and then show him afterward how your product fits his needs.
Raymond Rubicam
The opposite of creativity is cynicism.
Esa Saarinen
It pays to advertise.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Poor copy cannot overcome faults or gaps in dealer distribution; it cannot even cash in on the finest dealer setups. But good copy can, and does, surmount many dealer difficulties, making them secondary, and selling in spite of them.
Victor Schwab
Advertising is nothing but an expense (not an investment) unless it gets the kind of action desired by the advertiser.
Victor Schwab
The attention-value of an advertisement is approximately twice as important as the actual convincingness of the text itself.
Daniel Starch
Nothing can take the place of copy for persuasion, for downright selling.
G. Lynn Sumner
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
Margaret Thatcher
To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies. So it is something in which no one believes, and to which no one objects.
Margaret Thatcher
If you’re not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?
Robert Townsend
Early to bed, early to rise. Work like hell, and advertise.
Ted Turner
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Mark Twain
Advertising begins and ends with copy – begins with good copy, ends with bad.
Walter Weir
It is always better to have a few people read your advertisement and buy your product than to have a lot of them read it and do nothing about it.
Walter Weir
“For the past 20 years I had thought that great brands were features and functionality – you know, ‘whiter whites’ or ‘cleaner cleans’ – and if you can get the emotional connection then you have a huge winner on your hands.”
Meg Whitman
Most of us can’t even begin to imagine.
Meg Whitman
Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community.
Meg Whitman
In writing good advertising it is necessary to put a mood into words and to transfer that mood to the reader.
Helen Woodward
It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical; at such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold.
Boris Yeltsin
An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements.
James Webb Young
Fred Allen
Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.
Aristotle
Those who are blessed with the most talent don't necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
Mary Kay Ash
A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one.
Mary Kay Ash
Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’
Mary Kay Ash
Advertising is like learning – a little is a dangerous thing. If a man has not the pluck to keep on advertising, all the money he has already spent is lost.
P.T. Barnum
The real advertising writer who is after results makes the reader want something – and then provides what the reader will consider a good excuse for buying it.
Clyde Bedell
Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent.
William Bernbach
Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.
William Bernbach
The heart of creativity is discipline.
William Bernbach
The memorable never emerged from a formula.
William Bernbach
The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.
William Bernbach
Execution isn’t a vehicle for delivering a selling message. It is a selling message.
William Bernbach
There are two motives to action: self-interest and fear.
Napoleon Bonaparte
There’s mass mediocrity in every business. The trouble is, in advertising the whole world sees it.
Bill Borders
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
Steuart H. Britt
There is no such thing as ‘soft sell’ and ‘hard sell.’ There is only ‘smart sell’ and ‘stupid sell.
Charles Browder
A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
Warren Buffett
75% of the benefit of advertising, is that you advertise.
Jeremy Bullmore
When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.
Leo Burnett
If you can’t turn yourself into a consumer, you probably shouldn’t be in the advertising business at all.
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
Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.
Leo Burnett
People aren’t interested in you. They’re interested in themselves.
Dale Carnegie
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
Dale Carnegie
Dickens didn't write what people wanted; he wanted what people wanted.
G.K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
G.K. Chesterton
Sometimes the most important job advertising can do, is to clarify the obvious.
Jay Chiat
The real secret of success is enthusiasm.
Walter P. Chrysler
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
Winston Churchill
We have become so accustomed to hearing everyone claim that his product is the best in the world, or the cheapest, that we take all such statements with a grain of salt.
Robert Collier
Playing safe is probably the most unsafe thing in the world. You cannot stand still. You must go forward.
Robert Collier
Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.
Robert Collier
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word.
Joseph Conrad
Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming
How dismal is progress without publicity.
Theodore Dreiser
The passions are the only advocates which invariably persuade.
Theodore Dreiser
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
Thomas A. Edison
There are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.
Thomas A. Edison
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein
A required change never has unanimity of support, and by the time it does, it’s usually too late.
Carly Fiorina
A little bad makes the good believable.
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin
We don't want to be something for everybody, we want to be everything for some people.
Carlos Ghosn
A concept is stronger than a fact.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
People don’t read advertising, they read what interests them. Sometimes, it’s an ad.
Howard Gossage
I don’t know how to speak to everybody, only to somebody.
Howard Gossage
Explaining makes for lousy marketing.
Dan Heath
You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.
Theodore Hesburgh
Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can’t.
Morris Hite
In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. ”
Lee Iacocca
Originality is undetected plagiarism.
William Ralph Inge
Advertisements contain the only truth to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Erica Jong
Advertising is Salesmanship in Print.
John E. Kennedy
Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.
Milan Kundera
Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
Ray Kroc
If you don’t sell, it’s not the product that’s wrong, it’s you.
Estee Lauder
If you can go from a big idea to a big ideal; if you can tap into a cultural truth; if you can tap into something in which society is wildly interested in at the moment, you have a huge opportunity.
Shelly Lazarus
If you don’t believe in your product, or if you’re not consistent and regular in the way you promote it, the odds of succeeding go way down.
Jay Conrad Levinson
People will buy anything that is ‘one to a customer.
Sinclair Lewis
Creativity can solve almost any problem.
George Lois
If you wish others to believe in you, you must first convince them that you believe in them.
Harvey Mackay
Don't confuse visibility with credibility.
Harvey Mackay
The sale begins when the customer says yes.
Harvey Mackay
Imagination is one of the last remaining legal means you have to gain an unfair advantage over your competition.
Ed McCabe
Selling is an art of passion. When you’re passionate about an idea, it shows.
Tom McElligott
All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.
Marshall McLuhan
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Marshall McLuhan
Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.
Marshall McLuhan
Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer.
Marilyn Monroe
Only the public can make a star. It’s the studios who try to make a ‘system’ out of it.
Marilyn Monroe
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Marilyn Monroe
Brands never die. You only stop reinventing them.
Indra Nooyi
Every advertisement must be considered as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.
David Ogilvy
The manufacturers who dedicate their advertising to building the most favorable image, the most sharply defined personality for their brands, are the ones who will get the largest share of those markets at the highest profit – in the long run.
David Ogilvy
You cannot bore people into buying your product.
David Ogilvy
The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.
David Ogilvy
Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.
David Ogilvy
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
The secret of all true persuasion is to induce the person to persuade himself.
Harry Overstreet
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
Pablo Picasso
Copy is a direct conversation with the consumer.
Shirley Polykoff
You can’t write anything while you’re depressed. You have to stimulate yourself, and I don’t mean liquor. That only makes you dopey.
Shirley Polykoff
You generate better when you think you’re gorgeous.
Shirley Polykoff
(I’m) just an articulate consumer in the client’s offices.
Shirley Polykoff
Let’s try honesty.
John E. Powers
The consumer tends to remember just one thing from advertising – one strong claim, or one strong concept.
Rosser Reeves
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
What do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?
Rosser Reeves
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 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
Resist the usual.
Raymond Rubicam
Mirror the reader to himself and then show him afterward how your product fits his needs.
Raymond Rubicam
The opposite of creativity is cynicism.
Esa Saarinen
It pays to advertise.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Poor copy cannot overcome faults or gaps in dealer distribution; it cannot even cash in on the finest dealer setups. But good copy can, and does, surmount many dealer difficulties, making them secondary, and selling in spite of them.
Victor Schwab
Advertising is nothing but an expense (not an investment) unless it gets the kind of action desired by the advertiser.
Victor Schwab
The attention-value of an advertisement is approximately twice as important as the actual convincingness of the text itself.
Daniel Starch
Nothing can take the place of copy for persuasion, for downright selling.
G. Lynn Sumner
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
Margaret Thatcher
To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies. So it is something in which no one believes, and to which no one objects.
Margaret Thatcher
If you’re not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?
Robert Townsend
Early to bed, early to rise. Work like hell, and advertise.
Ted Turner
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Mark Twain
Advertising begins and ends with copy – begins with good copy, ends with bad.
Walter Weir
It is always better to have a few people read your advertisement and buy your product than to have a lot of them read it and do nothing about it.
Walter Weir
“For the past 20 years I had thought that great brands were features and functionality – you know, ‘whiter whites’ or ‘cleaner cleans’ – and if you can get the emotional connection then you have a huge winner on your hands.”
Meg Whitman
Most of us can’t even begin to imagine.
Meg Whitman
Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community.
Meg Whitman
In writing good advertising it is necessary to put a mood into words and to transfer that mood to the reader.
Helen Woodward
It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical; at such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold.
Boris Yeltsin
An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements.
James Webb Young
