“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.

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.

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

Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.

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.

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially – like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.

You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place.

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.

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

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.

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.

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

The average call me obsessed, the successful call me for advice.

Average is a failing plan! Average doesn’t work in any area of life. Anything that you give only average amounts of attention to will start to subside and will eventually cease to exist.

First of all, I’m no better than the next person.

Critics only speak up when they see someone shining. Average work doesn’t threaten them.

Until our mission becomes our obsession, we’ll be chained to the realm of average.

The average are addicted to leisure. The exceptional are obsessed with learning.

Ninety-nine percent of people believe they can’t do great things, so they aim for mediocrity.

In this generation, along with the dominating traits, the recessive ones also reappear, their individuality fully revealed, and they do so in the decisively expressed average proportion of 3:1, so that among each four plants of this generation three receive the dominating and one the recessive characteristic.