Angeline’s Advertising Crash Course

1. Angeline’sAdvertising Crash Course

2. "Advertising is of the very essence of democracy. An election goes on every minute of across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores, where customers state their preferences and determine which manufacturer and which product shall be the leader today, and which shall lead tomorrow." -- Bruce Barton

3. "Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can't." -- Morris Hite

4. "Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by the beauty of the picture - and forget that merchandise must be sold." -- James Randolph Adams

5. "If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks." -- Leo Burnett

6. “You have only 30 seconds. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire." -- David Ogilvy

7. "The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself." -- Leo Burnett

8. "The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever's wrong in the merchant's business. If the truth isn't tellable, fix it so it is. That is about all there is to it." -- John E. Powers

9. "A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy are as important as ever, but in the advertising of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain't got nothin'." -- Leo Burnett

10. "What helps people, helps business." -- Leo Burnett

11. "Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it." -- William Bernbach

12. "The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're 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 unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly." -- William Bernbach

13. "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 give it memory value." -- Morris Hite

14. It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by -- Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics. -- Ren Mulford Jr.

15. When the product is right, you don't have to be a great marketer. -- Lee Iacocca

16. "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." -- William Bernbach

17. "Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read." -- Leo Burnett

18. "Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it.'" -- Leo Burnett

19. "If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all." -- Leo Burnett

20. "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." -- William Bernbach

21. "To establish a favorable and well-defined brand personality with the consumer the advertiser must be consistent. You can't use a comic approach today and a scientist in a white jacket tomorrow without diffusing and damaging your brand personality." -- Morris Hite.

22. "What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form." -- David Ogilvy

23. "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." -- David Ogilvy

24. "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." -- David Ogilvy

25. "I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive." -- David Ogilvy

26. "If you are writing about baloney, don't try to make it Cornish hen, because that is the worst kind of baloney there is. Just make it darned good baloney." -- Leo Burnett

27. "I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes . . . ." -- Philip Dusenberry

28. "I think central to good writing of advertising, or anything else, is a person who has developed an understanding of people, an insight into them, a sympathy toward them. I think that that develops more sharply when the writer has not had an easy adjustment to living. So that they have themselves felt the need for understanding, the need for sympathy, and can therefore see that need in other people." -- George Gribbin

29. "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." -- David Ogilvy

30. "You must make the product interesting, not just make the ad different. And that's what too many of the copywriters in the U.S. today don't yet understand." -- Rosser Reeves

31. "The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in a letter or told to an acquaintance." -- George P. Rowell

32. "Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten." -- William Bernbach

33. "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." -- William Bernbach

34. "In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal." -- William Bernbach

35. "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

36. "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 Famina

37. "Contrary to what self-appointed protectors of the consumer so loudly proclaim, advertising does not cause people to buy bad products. Nothing will put a bad product out of business faster than a good advertising campaign. Advertising causes people to try a product once, but poor quality eliminates any possibility of a repeat purpose." -- Morris Hite

38. "Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising." -- Mark Twain

39. "General advertising is Cyrano. He comes under your window and sings; people get used to it and ignore it. But if Roxane responds, there's a relationship. We move the brand relationship up a notch. Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship." -- Lester Wunderman

40. "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." -- William Bernbach

41. "The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product." -- John Berger

42. "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

43. "Fun without sell gets nowhere but sell without fun tends to become obnoxious." -- Leo Burnett

44. "There is no such thing as a permanent advertising success." -- Leo Burnett

45. "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." -- William Bernbach

46. "Regardless of the moral issue, dishonesty in advertising has proved very unprofitable." -- Leo Burnett

47. "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." -- DavidOgilvy

48. "[L]ying and cheating in advertising, in the long run, are commercial suicide. Dishonesty in advertising destroys not only confidence in advertising, but also in the medium which carries the dishonest advertisement. . . . No one can be ill in a community without endangering others; no advertiser can be dishonest without casting suspicion upon others." -- Daniel Starch

49. "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." -- David Ogilvy

50. "Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image." -- David Ogilvy