Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.
Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.
If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.
The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.
In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.
You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You've got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don't feel it, nothing will happen.
Word of mouth is the best medium of all.
A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.
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.
In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal.
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.
In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.
Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.
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.
We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea.
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.
Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.
Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.
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.
