Bruce Barton Quotes

As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world.

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

In the area we're discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings.

All the people who run agencies, all the important people in agencies have taken communication courses, marketing courses, advertising courses, and courses basically teach advertising as a science, and advertising is so far from a science it isn't even funny. Advertising is an art.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater work of the regeneration and redemption of mankind.

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.

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

'Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising' by Winston Fletcher - the impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, self-serving, occasionally brilliant but ultimately shallow business.

Why does almost every ad agency in the world set the time on a watch at 10:10 before photographing it?

Style is a capitalist invention. It's a trademark. It's very useful in the world of commerce to have a good trademark, but it wasn't my first concern. I got restless

Good marketing offers us a view of the world. Bad marketing offers us a product to buy.

Long before social media existed, the proto-tweets of advertising had penetrated American popular culture: 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste.' 'Where's the beef?' 'A diamond is forever.' 'Think different.' You'd be hard pressed to find a writer's craft that has more directly influenced the vernacular.

I don't like ads. I don't like selling things. That's not me.

The longest word in the world is "a word from our sponsor."

Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

Advertising is the art of persuasion.

Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash.

Like propaganda generally, advertising must thus pervade the atmosphere; for it wants, paradoxically, to startle its beholders without really being noticed by them. Its aim is to jolt us, not "into thinking," as in a Brechtian formulation, but specifically away from thought, into quasiautomatic action: "To us," as an executive at Coca-Cola puts it, "communication is message assimilation--the respondent must be shown to behave in some way that proves they [sic] have come to accept the message, not merely to have received it.

Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do.

The greatest story ever told is, in fact, the greatest story ever sold

It might be bold to put your work into the world unadorned, but it's probably ineffective.

Advertising is like learning - a little is a dangerous thing.