Pastoral Resources

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.

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

Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.

Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.

Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped.

Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

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.

It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.

Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.

Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

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.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.