If you are writing about baloney, don’t try and make it Cornish hen, because that’s the worst kind of baloney there is. Just make it darn good baloney.
—Leo Burnett (1891–1971) American Advertising Executive
Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
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 (1899–1948) American Writer, Artist
Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left. It’s totally dishonest.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
—Thomas Merton (1915–68) American Trappist Monk
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
—Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) American-British Novelist, Screenwriter
The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.
—Leo Burnett (1891–1971) American Advertising Executive
Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
—Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) Canadian Political Scientist, Humorist
What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
In good times, people want to advertise; in bad times, they have to.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton (1886–1967) American Author, Advertising Executive, Politician
Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American Novelist
Advertising is the principal reason why the businessman has come to inherit the earth.
—James Randolph Adams (1898–1956) American Advertising Executive
The most common trouble with advertising is that it tries too hard to impress people.
—James Randolph Adams (1898–1956) American Advertising Executive
The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is test. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.
—Anthony Trollope (1815–82) English Novelist
Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.
—Leo Burnett (1891–1971) American Advertising Executive
Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
—Jerry Della Femina (b.1936) American Advertising Executive
What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself.
—Leo Burnett (1891–1971) American Advertising Executive
Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
—Enoch Powell (1912–98) English Conservative Politician, Scholar
Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret … to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink.
—Leo Burnett (1891–1971) American Advertising Executive
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist
The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
—Louis Kronenberger (1904–80) American Drama, Literary Critic
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 (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
If advertising had a little more respect for the public, the public would have a lot more respect for advertising.
—James Randolph Adams (1898–1956) American Advertising Executive
A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
We read advertisements to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready — even eager — to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster.
—Jerry Della Femina (b.1936) American Advertising Executive
Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.
—J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) English Novelist, Playwright, Critic
Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
—John Berger (1926–2017) English Art Critic, Novelist
Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
—Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) British Crime Writer
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out — either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don’t think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive
Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
—David Ogilvy (1911–99) British-American Advertising Executive