COMMUNICATION

 

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

   

   

  - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

   

• "The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly."

   

   

  - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

   

• "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."

   

   

  - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.

   

• "Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it.'"

   

   

  - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 50.

   

• "Words give you a medium, if you will, and make your message part of the human thought process. Words are as portable as the human being who hears them."

   

   

  - James J. Jordan, Jr., quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 107.

   

• "I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information."

   

   

  - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books, p. 7.

   

• "As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise."

   

   

  - George Will (1976), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 71.