Advertising Copy Quotes

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.

I read rip-and-read news, but I wasn't a reporter. I was reading the wire, and the other thing was, I was reading commercials - and I could do a hell of a commercial.

Everybody sat around thinking about Panasonic, the Japanese electronics account. Finally I decided, what the hell, I'll throw a line to loosen them up. 'The headline is, the headline is: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.'

I can't write. I can handle bits of simple-minded advert copy or a poster slogan, so answering questions is about all I'm good for.

I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.

I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them.

Copywriting probably did make me a commercial writer. Nobody wants to read advertising copy, so you have to keep it punchy; you almost have trick them into reading it. You have to make every sentence work.

Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question “Why should I buy this book?

Such exaggerations have been so common that the public takes them with a grain of salt and partly excuses them as being due to the advertiser's license of self-assertiveness. Nevertheless, the fact remains that superlative generalities are weak arguments and far less convincing than a statement of facts. Much advertising copy would be improved immensely by doing away with brag and substituting actual facts about the merits of the article.