Top 55 Bernbach Quotes
#1. I'm sounding like an old fart talking about how bad advertising is today, but it's true. Advertising sucks. Guys like me and Bob Gage and certainly Bill Bernbach and two or three other guys, we exemplified and led the creative revolution.
George Lois
#2. Doyle Dane Bernbach was a great, great agency when I got there. There was an arrogance that everyone had, but it was a closed club. I was a guy who worked a little differently. Edgier. More punch-in-the-mouth.
George Lois
#3. I came into advertising in 1961. I had been turned down for jobs on the Ford account in the late Fifties as 'not their type.' If it hadn't been for Bill Bernbach, I would now be sitting in some luncheonette, continuing my life as a messenger.
Jerry Della Femina
#4. Most of the people in advertising now - mention Bill Bernbach to them, they don't know.
Jerry Della Femina
#5. 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.
William Bernbach
#6. The difference between the forgettable and the enduring is artistry.
William Bernbach
#7. It may well be that creativity is the last unfair advantage we're legally allowed to take over our competitors.
William Bernbach
#8. Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.
William Bernbach
#9. Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.
William Bernbach
#10. Properly practiced creativity must result in greater sales more economically achieved. Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent.
William Bernbach
#11. Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise ... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.
William Bernbach
#12. A principle isn't a principle until it costs you something.
William Bernbach
#13. A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.
William Bernbach
#14. It's not just what you say that stirs people. It's the way that you say it.
William Bernbach
#15. No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway.
William Bernbach
#16. If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.
William Bernbach
#17. Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature ... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action. If you know these things abut a person, you can touch him at the core of his being.
William Bernbach
#18. An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.
William Bernbach
#20. Logic and over-analysis can immobilise and sterilize an idea. It's like love. The more you analyse it, the more it disappears.
William Bernbach
#21. The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.
William Bernbach
#22. 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
#23. Find the simple story in the product, and present it in an articulate and intelligent, persuasive way.
William Bernbach
#24. I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.
William Bernbach
#26. Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.
William Bernbach
#28. Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.
William Bernbach
#29. Those who are going to be in business tomorrow are those who understand that the future, as always, belongs to the brave.
William Bernbach
#30. The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them he will fail.
William Bernbach
#31. You have to live with your product, you have to know it through and through, you have to look at it, understand it, love it then, and only then, you can crystallize in one clear thought, one single theme, what must be conveyed about the product to the consumer.
William Bernbach
#32. Never do anything yourself that you can hire someone else to do, especially if they can do it better.
William Bernbach
#33. We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.
William Bernbach
#38. In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.
William Bernbach
#39. If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some people against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.
William Bernbach
#40. The G.O.P. and the conservative establishment in America are on the verge of a reckoning.
JP Bernbach
#41. For the Flower to blossom, you need the right soil as well as the right seed. The same is true to cultivate good thinking.
William Bernbach
#42. All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarise that society. We can brutalise it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.
William Bernbach
#43. Is creativity some obscure, esoteric art form? Not on your life. It's the most practical thing a business-man can employ.
William Bernbach
#44. You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You've got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don't feel it, nothing will happen.
William Bernbach
#46. You cannot sell a man who isn't listening; word of mouth is the best medium of all; and dullness won't sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.
William Bernbach
#47. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
William Bernbach
#48. 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.
William Bernbach
#49. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.
William Bernbach
#50. Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed ... but dull?
William Bernbach
#51. Adapt your techniques to an idea, not an idea to your techniques.
William Bernbach
#54. Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.
William Bernbach
#55. We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea.
William Bernbach
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