Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
You now have to decide what 'image' you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place.
Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.
The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You've got to believe in the product.
Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped.
What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
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.
Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.
First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.
Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.
Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.
I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.
If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.
Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga.
The headline is the 'ticket on the meat.' Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.
Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
Leaders grasp nettles.
