John O'Toole Quotes

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.

If you look at the heritage of the best advertising, you can make stuff that is great for both readers and advertisers. I don't think Don Draper would have loved banner ads.

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

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

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

The advent of Google+ and the emergence of the personalized web means this is more true than ever. Brands, and their advertising partners, must wake up to this challenge and define themselves with clarity, consistency and authenticity. Otherwise they just might find themselves shouting in a ghost town.

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

If an ad campaign is built around a weak idea - or as is so often the case, no idea at all - I don't give a damn how good the execution is, it's going to fail.

You put choice on the table, you change the whole game. Everything is about control. If an ad is interesting to you, you'll have the conversation with the brand. If it's not, it's a waste of time.

Evolve is an amazing promotion.

Realtime ads are the perfect way for an advertiser to connect with users in a social environment.

Look, fundamentally the more you know about someone, the better you can communicate with them at a human level, or a mass-communication-advertising level.

I won't say I'm not fascinated by the way advertising works. I like the sleekness. But a picture in advertising doesn't last too long. They have to work for 30 seconds. And I'd like to reach at least two minutes. This is my goal: to break that two-minute record.

Great advertising triggers an emotion in you. It has purpose. It touches a nerve, and that provokes a reaction.

Apple has great marketing, among the best PR and marketing in the world.

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.

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.

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

It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.

I want everybody in the news business to think of ABC before they go any place else. If it costs us an extra few thousand dollars to do that, what does it mean?

Marketing is designed to bring people into something.

Facebook has stitched together your social graph. The idea of an interest graph is to bring together everyone that has shared interests. If I can isolate the people who are into mountain biking in Marin, in one place, the ability to put ads against that is really high.

We didn't realize it at the time, but the release date, the ad campaign and the poster are so important.

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'.