ATTENTION
- "If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is
academic."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . .
(1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.
- "If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to
be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming
or without tricks."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing
Advertising: Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990),
Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, p. 26.
- "Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up
beneath his notice."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett
Company, p. 64.
- "People are very sophisticated about advertising now. You have to
entertain them. You have to present a product honestly and with a tremendous
amount of pizzazz and flair, the way it's done in a James Bond movie. But
you can't run the same ad over and over again. You have to change your
approach constantly to keep on getting their attention . . . ."
-
- - Mary Wells Lawrence, quoted in Newsweek, October 1966.
- "You have only 30 seconds [in a TV commercial]. If you grab attention
in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of
holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open
with something dull ... When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open
with the fire."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York:
Vintage Books, p. 111.
- "The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the
attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to
stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever's wrong in the
merchant's business. If the truth isn't tellable, fix it so it is. That is
about all there is to it."
-
- - John E. Powers, 19th Century copywriter, quoted in Stephen Fox, The
Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators
(1984), New York: William Morrow and Company, p. 28.
- "Advertisements ordinarily work their wonders, to the extent that
they work at all, on an inattentive public."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its
Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p.
3.