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

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

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

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.

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don’t destroy them. They lay golden eggs.

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.

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

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

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.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

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.

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.