William Bernbach Quotes (31 Quotes)

In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal.

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.

Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.

Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn.

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.

Advertising isn't a science. It's persuasion. And persuasion is an art.

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.

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.

The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.

Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you. Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before.

If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some people against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.

A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what your saying, and they can't know what you've 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 until you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.

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.

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.

Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.

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.

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?

Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.

Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature . . . what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action . . . if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.

With our industry being watched so carefully by governmental agencies, with the FTC ready to pounce on every claim we make, what we CAN say in our ads is forever narrowing and the sharpest tool left for us is HOW we say it.

Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.

In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.

Word of mouth is the best medium of all.

An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.

We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea.