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Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories.
Oct 1, 2025
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.
Rarely have I seen any really great advertising created without a certain amount of confusion, throw-aways, bent noses, irritation and downright cursedness.
Let's say you have $1,000,000 tied up in your little company and suddenly your advertising isn't working and sales are going down. And everything depends on it. Your future depends on it, your family's future depends on it, other people's families depend on it. Now, 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?
Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men.
There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there's one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
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.
That's great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you'd want to spend more than three hours in.
If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other. The general raising of the standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half ce
What helps people, helps business.
Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.
Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.
On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.
I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
Give them quality. That's the best kind of advertising.
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
Advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news it is worthless.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife.
In advertising, not to be different is virtually suicidal.
Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.
Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it.'
Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.
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.
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.
A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster.
If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.
Nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.
Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.
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.
I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death.
The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men - the man he is and the man he wants to be.
The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
A good ad which is not run never produces sales.
Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.
The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.