William Bernbach Quotes

A good ad which is not run never produces sales.

The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.

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'.

That's a comic cover's job: Attract someone's attention and persuade them to try the issue out.

Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up beneath his notice.

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

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

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

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.

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.

The ingredients for great advertising haven't changed since the 'Mad Men' era: Brands win if their advertising is relevant and people like it.

I'm in the industry, and I'll fast-forward through the ads most of the time. But I'll stop for the good ones.

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.

There is no such thing as a Mass Mind. The Mass Audience is made up of individuals, and good advertising is written always from one person to another. When it is aimed at millions it rarely moves anyone.

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.

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.

When you think about advertisements, it makes sense that they want to hold and retain our attention.

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.

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.

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.

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

My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.

Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.

Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.

All writers know how important a good title is. It's the first thing readers see, along with a knock-your-socks-off cover - a seductive 'come hither' for the story within.