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.

Properly practiced creativity must result in greater sales more economically achieved. Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent.

We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea.

Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed... but dull?

In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.

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

There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.

The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.

Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you. Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before.

Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.

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.

No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway.

An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.

It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.

In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal.

You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You've got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don't feel it, nothing will happen.

In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.

Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn.

Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.

A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.

Word of mouth is the best medium of all.

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

Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

A principle isn't a principle until it costs you something.

We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.

A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time.

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

Cleverness is not wisdom.

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.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you.

Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.

A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

I kept bugging them about making it more upscale, because I felt Abby, through her cleverness and business sense, was a character who would move up. And that's what she did.