Advertising

[S]usceptibility is the keynote of human psychology.
~ William Francis (W.F.) Barnard, The Buying Impulse And How To Lead It (1920).

A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
~ Bill Bernbach, in Bill Bernbach's Book (1987).

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.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic!
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal.
~ Bill Bernbach, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry (1993). The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations

It's always a mistake to make good advertising for a bad product.
~ Bill Bernbach

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules ... but there's one little rub. They forget that advertising is persuasion, and persuasion is not a science, but an art. Advertising is the art of persuasion.
~ Bill Bernbach, quoted in Stephen Fox The Mirror Makers (1984)

To keep your ads fresh you've got to keep yourself fresh. Live in the current idiom and you will create in it.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

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.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything.
~ William Blissett

The fact must never be forgotten that no magazine publisher in the United States could give what it is giving to the reader each month if it were not for the revenue which the advertiser brings the magazine. It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence. The American advertiser has made the superior American magazine of today possible.
~ Edward William Bok (1898), quoted in The Commercial Connection: Advertising & the American Mass Media (1979).

Never before the advent of radio did advertising have such a golden opportunity to make an ass out of itself. Never before could advertising be so insistent and so unmannerly and so affront its audience.
~ William John ("W.J.") Cameron, in Advertising Age 9 (21 February 1938). Cameron Raps Bad Reporting, Blatant Radio

The philosophy behind much advertising is based on old observation that every man is really two men -- the man he is and the man he wants to be.
~ William Feather, quoted in The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations (1978).

There is an absolute necessity for advertising; there is a great eagerness to compete for attention, and no one gets it unless it is by giving, as it were, so many strokes of the hammer, one after the other, to compel people to notice what is going on.
~ William Ewart Gladstone

If you make a product good enough, even though you live in the depths of the forest, the public will make a path to your door, says the philosopher. But if you want the public in sufficient numbers, you better construct a highway. Advertising is that highway.
~ William Randolph Hearst

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.
~ William Randolph Hearst

Putting out a newspaper without promotion is like winking at a girl in the dark -- well-intentioned, but ineffective.
~ William Randolph Hearst

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. 'Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart.'
~ Bill Hicks, from Revelations (1992 Comedy Routine).

I thought we lived in the U.S. of A., the United States of America. But actually we live in the U.S. of A., the United States of Advertising. Freedom of expression is guaranteed? If you've got the money!
~ Bill Hicks (on being censored from "The Late Show with David Letterman")

[T]here will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.
~ William Dean Howells, from Literature And Life (1902). The Art of the Adsmith

If you have a good thing you must tell about it. Telling makes selling. Telling is advertising.
~ (Col.) William C. Hunter, Dollars and Sense: Being Memoranda made in the School of Practical Experience (1907). Advertising

Instead of spending money on advertising, get out and be your agency's advertising. Community betterment activities far outshine self-serving statements in the print or electronic media.
~ Bill Kelley, in American Agent & Broker (May 1988). Making Your Mark in a New Community

To think that the effects of advertising, such a potent environment in any industrialized country, could be limited to economics, is as absurd as assuming that the effects of a hot climate upon a culture could be limited to tropical diseases.
~ William Kuhns, Waysteps to Eden: Ads and Commercials (1970).

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don't know which half.
~ William Hesketh Lever (Lord Leverhulme), quoted in Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963).

Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge of human nature, what dearly bought experiences go into the making of an advertisement?
~ William John Locke, Septimus (1908). Chapter IV

People have romantic notions about television. In the highest realms they think it's some sort of art medium, and it's not. Others think it's an entertainment medium, it's not that either. It's an advertising medium. It's a method to deliver advertising like a cigarette is a method to deliver nicotine.
~ Bill Maher (during the "Just for Laughs" festival), The Toronto Sun (22 July 2002).

It is taken for granted, in an age like the present, that every man pretends to the utmost he can do, and he who pretends to little is apt to be thought capable of nothing.
~ William Mathews, Getting on in the World: Or, Hints on Success in Life (1872). Chapter XIII. Self-Advertising

Long live your laundry!
~ Billy Mays, The Seattle Times (25 December 2002). Pitchman Billy Mays gives Orange its Glo

I have no wish to advertise rubbish by attacking it.
~ William Lyon ("Billy") Phelps, in Scribner's Magazine, Vol. LXXII, No. 4 (October 1922). As I Like It

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.
~ Will Rogers

Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it.
~ Will Rogers

One Ad is worth more to a paper than forty Editorials.
~ Will Rogers, quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970).

We are living in an age of publicity. It used to be only saloons and circuses that wanted their name in the paper, but now it's corporations, churches, preachers, scientists, colleges, and cemeteries.
~ Will Rogers, Daily Telegrams (23 June 1931).

Advertising is the foot on the accelerator, the hand on the throttle, the spur on the flank that keeps our economy surging forward.
~ Robert William Sarnoff

We are advertis'd by our loving friends.
~ William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III

There's a major change going on in the whole advertising community. It has to do with the fact that, traditionally, people are not watching 30-second commercials.
~ Bill Squadron, St. Petersburg Times (14 July 2001). A view of the future: Interactive technology will soon transform the way viewers experience sports on television

Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for the millions.
~ William Allen White, quoted in Printers' Ink: A Journal For Advertisers (11 May 1922). An Editor's Opinion on Advertising

Although advertising is communication unusually candid about its motivation, Americans love to loathe it. As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of "experts" become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some "they" is manipulating "us," using, among other dark arts, advertising.
~ George F. Will, in Austin American-Statesman (26 January 1996). The Forbes Phenomenon: Should political communication be rationed?

[A]n appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product.
~ George F. Will, from The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts (1978). Privacy in the Republic of Appetites

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
~ George F. Will, from The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts (1978). Personality Against Character

Win the heart and the mind will follow.
~ Roy H. Williams, The Monday Morning Memo (30 December 2002). Shadow of an Unspoken Question

[I]n a climate where media and marketing concentrate on the young to a staggering degree, the images of what age might be are seldom encouraging. What is there to aspire to in age? What does the good life look like for those who don't have the opportunities -- for financial or social or health reasons -- to live as the marketing industry seems to assume you ought to live?
~ Dr. Rowan Williams, A lecture to mark the Centenary of Friends of the Elderly, Church House Conference Centre , Westminster, London UK (6 September 2005). The gifts reserved for age: perceptions of the elderly

Advertisements are only offensive when out of place.
~ (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (1928).

Make a good product for a fair price?-- then tell the world.
~ William Wrigley, Jr., in Illustrated World, Volume XXXVII, Number 1 (March 1922). Make a Good Product for a Fair Price -- Then Tell the World

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal.
~ William K. Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976). 4. Style