I have learned that you can't have good advertising without a good client, that you can't keep a good client without good advertising, and no client will ever buy better advertising than he understands or has an appetite for. |
I have learned to respect ideas, wherever they come from. Often they come from clients. Account executives often have big creative ideas, regardless of what some writers think. |
I planned from about the time I was in my late 20s that I wanted to be retired from working for someone else by the time I was 50, |
I regard a great ad as the most beautiful thing in the world. |
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. |
If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all. |
If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks. |
Let's gear our advertising to sell goods, but let's recognize also that advertising has a broad social responsibility. |
Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read. |
Plan the sale when you plan the ad. |
Rarely have I seen any really great advertising created without a certain amount of confusion, throw-aways, bent noses, irritation and downright cursedness. |
Regardless of the moral issue, dishonesty in advertising has proved very unprofitable. |
The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself. |
The principal mark of genius is not perfection, but originality. |
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. |