Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Sinclair Lewis
If an ad campaign is built around a weak idea – or as is so often the case, no idea at all – I don’t give a damn how good the execution is, it’s going to fail.
Morris Hite
There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.
David Ogilvy
It is the unrelenting, oppressive pressure to be imaginative that is responsible for most bad advertising. It causes people to suspend judgment, to lose sight of priorities, and to forget what they’re supposed to be doing.
John Egley
Suggested reading:
The product that will not sell without advertising will not sell profitably with advertising.
Albert Lasker
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
Marshall McLuhan
The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.
Thomas Jefferson
Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.
Will Rogers
Our society’s values are being corrupted by advertising’s insistence on the equation: Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness.
John Fisher
There is no such thing as a Mass Mind. The Mass Audience is made up of individuals, and good advertising is written always from one person to another. When it is aimed at millions it rarely moves anyone.
Fairfax Cone
If you use your money to create exceptional products and services, you won’t need to spend it on advertising.
Seth Godin
Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising.
Milton Hershey
People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.
Mark Zuckerberg
There’s never been a better time to be in advertising, and there’s never been a worse time.
Aaron Reitkopf
Stop advertising and start innovating.
Seth Godin
Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.
Leo Burnett
Asked about the power of advertising in research surveys, most agree that it works, but not on them.
Eric Clark
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
Fred Allen
The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements.
Thomas Jefferson
What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
David Ogilvy
Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.
David Ogilvy
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.
William Feather
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain
Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.
J.B. Priestley
Next to Christianity, advertising is the greatest force in the world. And I say that without sacrilege or disrespect. Advertising makes people discontented. It makes them want things they don’t have. Without discontent, there is no progress, no achievement.
Morris Hite
We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
Zelda Fitzgerald
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas
Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick.
Samuel Johnson
The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to make it memorable.
Morris Hite
The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.
Samuel Johnson
The time has come when advertising in some hands has reached the status of a science.
Claude C. Hopkins