In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.
Those who are going to be in business tomorrow are those who understand that the future, as always, belongs to the brave.
Logic and over-analysis can immobilise and sterilize an idea. It's like love. The more you analyse it, the more it disappears.
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?
Imitation can be commercial suicide.
Advertising is the art of persuasion.
Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.
Word of mouth is the best medium of all.
All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarise that society. We can brutalise it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.
Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.
The difference between the forgettable and the enduring is artistry.
Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.
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.
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.
A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.
The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them he will fail.
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.
You have to live with your product, you have to know it through and through, you have to look at it, understand it, love it then, and only then, you can crystallize in one clear thought, one single theme, what must be conveyed about the product to the consumer.
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.
A principle isn't a principle until it costs you something.
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.
For the Flower to blossom, you need the right soil as well as the right seed. The same is true to cultivate good thinking.
Don't confuse good taste with the absence of taste.
You cannot sell a man who isn't listening; word of mouth is the best medium of all; and dullness won't sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.
Research can trap you into the past.
