William Bernbach Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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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.
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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?
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Persuasion is not a science but an art
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A principle isn't a principle until it costs you something.
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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.
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The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.
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Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
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For the Flower to blossom, you need the right soil as well as the right seed. The same is true to cultivate good thinking.
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The difference between the forgettable and the enduring is artistry.
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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.
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The world has progressed to the point where it's most powerful force is public opinion. And I believe that in this world it is not the great book or epic play, as once was the case, that will shape that opinion, but those who understand mass media and the techniques of mass persuasion...We must not just believe in what we sell. We must sell what we believe in. And we must pour a vast energy into those causes.
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Advertising is the art of persuasion.
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A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.
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It may well be that creativity is the last unfair advantage we're legally allowed to take over our competitors.
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Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.
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Creativity is the most practical thing a businessman can employ.
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Research can trap you into the past.
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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.
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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.
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In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.
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The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're 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 unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.
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In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.
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In advertising, not to be different is virtually suicidal.
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Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.