Advertising

A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
~ Bill Bernbach, Quoted in Randall Rothenberg Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (1994)

Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you. 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.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic!
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal.
~ Bill Bernbach, Quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry (1993). The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations

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.
~ Bill Bernbach, Quoted in Stephen Fox The Mirror Makers (1984)

Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

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.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything.
~ William Blissett

The fact must never be forgotten that no magazine publisher in the United States could give what it is giving to the reader each month if it were not for the revenue which the advertiser brings the magazine. It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence. The American advertiser has made the superior American magazine of today possible.
~ Edward William Bok (1898), Quoted in John W. Wright The Commercial Connection: Advertising & the American Mass Media (1979)

Never before the advent of radio did advertising have such a golden opportunity to make an ass out of itself. Never before could advertising be so insistent and so unmannerly and so affront its audience.
~ William John ("W.J.") Cameron, in Advertising Age 9 (21 February 1938). Cameron Raps Bad Reporting, Blatant Radio

Furious Propaganda, with her brand,
Fires the dry prairies of our wide Waste Land;
Making the Earth, Man's temporal station, be
One stinking altar to Publicity.
~ Lee Wilson Dodd, The Great Enlightenment

The philosophy behind much advertising is based on old observation that every man is really two men -- the man he is and the man he wants to be.
~ William Feather, Quoted in The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations (1978).

If you make a product good enough, even though you live in the depths of the forest, the public will make a path to your door, says the philosopher. But if you want the public in sufficient numbers, you better construct a highway. Advertising is that highway.
~ William Randolph Hearst

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.
~ William Randolph Hearst

Putting out a newspaper without promotion is like winking at a girl in the dark -- well-intentioned, but ineffective.
~ William Randolph Hearst

I thought we lived in the U.S. of A., the United States of America. But actually we live in the U.S. of A., the United States of Advertising. Freedom of expression is guaranteed? If you've got the money!
~ Bill Hicks (on being censored from "The Late Show with David Letterman")

There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.
~ William Dean Howells, Quoted in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994).

To think that the effects of advertising, such a potent environment in any industrialized country, could be limited to economics, is as absurd as assuming that the effects of a hot climate upon a culture could be limited to tropical diseases.
~ William Kuhns, Waysteps to Eden: Ads and Commercials (1970).

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don't know which half.
~ William Hesketh Lever, Quoted in Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963).

Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge of human nature, what dearly bought experiences go into the making of an advertisement?
~ William John Locke, Septimus (1908). Chapter IV

People have romantic notions about television. In the highest realms they think it's some sort of art medium, and it's not. Others think it's an entertainment medium, it's not that either. It's an advertising medium. It's a method to deliver advertising like a cigarette is a method to deliver nicotine.
~ Bill Maher (during the "Just for Laughs" festival), The Toronto Sun (22 July 2002).

Long live your laundry!
~ Billy Mays, The Seattle Times (25 December 2002). Pitchman Billy Mays gives Orange its Glo

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.
~ Will Rogers

If advertisers spent the same amount of money improving their products as they do on advertising, then they wouldn't have to advertise them.
~ Will Rogers

One Ad is worth more to a paper than forty Editorials.
~ Will Rogers, Quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970).

We are living in an age of publicity. It used to be only saloons and circuses that wanted their name in the paper, but now it's corporations, churches, preachers, scientists, colleges, and cemeteries.
~ Will Rogers, Daily Telegrams (23 June 1931).

Advertising is the foot on the accelerator, the hand on the throttle, the spur on the flank that keeps our economy surging forward.
~ Robert William Sarnoff

We are advertis'd by our loving friends.
~ William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III

There's a major change going on in the whole advertising community. It has to do with the fact that, traditionally, people are not watching 30-second commercials.
~ Bill Squadron, St. Petersburg Times (14 July 2001). A view of the future: Interactive technology will soon transform the way viewers experience sports on television

Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for millions.
~ William Allen White, Quoted in The International Dictionary of Thoughts (1969).

Although advertising is communication unusually candid about its motivation, Americans love to loathe it. As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of "experts" become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some "they" is manipulating "us," using, among other dark arts, advertising.
~ George F. Will, in Austin American-Statesman (26 January 1996). The Forbes Phenomenon: Should political communication be rationed?

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
~ George F. Will, Quoted in The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations (1992).

Win the heart and the mind will follow.
~ Roy H. Williams, The Monday Morning Memo (30 December 2002)

Advertisements are only offensive when out of place.
~ (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (1928).

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal.
~ William K. Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976). 4. Style