Leo Burnett Quotes

Advertising is a nebulous beast at the best of times.

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.

Advertising is a wonderful lubricant for business, if it's used properly.

You can't test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre. Not that I don't care about demographics. You have to understand who you're going after.

I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than it is to write a good ad.

We're very much an advertising agency, but it's not about creating ads as we know it.

You have to prove that the Freberg way will sell their product better than if they just did straight advertising. Whenever I give a lecture or seminar, that's what I try to get across to people. I hear very few radio commercials that sound like I could have written them or that they got the idea.

No, sir, I'm not saying that charming, witty and warm copy won't sell. I'm just saying I've seen thousands of charming, witty campaigns that didn't sell.

The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.

An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, 'This is a good ad campaign.' So, there is a little bit of slippage there. That's just a caveat. That's different from actually having an effective ad campaign.

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.

They say that Madison Avenue will only pay high dollars in advertising if they get the 18-35 age range.

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

The simplest definition of advertising, and one that will probably meet the test of critical examination, is that advertising is selling in print.

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

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

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

When you create advertising, always start with the words.

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

I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes.

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.

American advertisers rely on 'essentially illogical' approaches to determine their advertising budgets.

We have always said that advertising is just the icing on the cake. It is not the cake.

People don't understand the logistics of advertising. To have the ads purchased and run, you need to have a series of products that work together.