Message Clarity 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.

No one is confused about what a Democrat is in a presidential election. In every election other than a presidential election, our voters are confused. We've given out too many different messages.

I don't particularly like messages, because everybody takes whatever they take from whatever.

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'.

Communication is not about speaking what we think. Communication is about ensuring others hear what we mean.

If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.

Vetting and verifying information is one thing. Having our government sending out conflicting messages to the American people when conflict can be avoided is another.

Never mistake legibility for communication.

People always say, 'Who is your audience?' and I could never put a finger on it - and I wouldn't want to put a finger on it.

I'm a marketeer, and I thought the message discipline in the Leave campaign was extraordinary.

Lib Dems are really good at making very detailed policies but very bad are communicating the core values that drive those policies. I'd like us to say less but more often. We need to focus on a few themes and go hard on them.

It is increasingly difficult to run a campaign of substance in an atmosphere which increasingly focuses on personality.

When we launched a new company, I reviewed the ads and marketing materials and asked those presenting the campaign to read everything aloud to test the phrasing and concept. If I could grasp it quickly, then it passed with muster. We would get our message across only if it was understandable at first glance.

What is said determines who listens and who understands. Graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances - accents, punctuation and so on - that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to. I’m interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are.

How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but how well we are understood.

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

We have to deal in 30 second sound bites. It's not your fault. It's not our fault.

The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself.

I think, at the end of the day, if voters don't see the substance and the merit of the policies you're advocating, it won't matter what you do on social media.

Dont confuse legibility with communication. Just because something is legible doesnt mean it communicates and, more importantly, doesnt mean it communicates the right thing.

The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which business renders.

The medium obscured the message.

Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file.

Early in my career, a critic said that I needed to "explain" the irony in my work, suggesting that I needed to add text next to the images to help people understand what I was trying to say. At first I was dismayed that I wasn't making work with a clear enough message. That's when I realized that that was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do - that I wasn't responsible for a misinterpretation of my work, that there should be some ambiguity to it. They either got it, or they didn't.

Learning how to communicate to big audiences, and how to frame a message in a way that works in a sound-bite world, that for me is very challenging.