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 his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen. |
Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before. |
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... but dull? |
Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling. |
No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway. |
Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make. |
Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature . . . what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action . . . if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being. |
Our job is to bring the dead facts to life. |
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. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message. |
Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten. |
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 make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent. |
The most powerful element in advertising is the truth. |
The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what your saying, and they can't know what you've saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting until you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly. |
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 little rub. They forget that advertising is persuasion, and persuasion is not a science, but an art. Advertising is the art of persuasion. |
There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past. |