Bill Bernbach Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.

Bill Bernbach
Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

Bill Bernbach
Word of mouth is the best medium of all.

Bill Bernbach
In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal.

Bill Bernbach
In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.

Bill Bernbach
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
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
Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.

Bill Bernbach
Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.

Bill Bernbach
The purpose of advertising is to sell. That is what the client is paying for and if that goal does not permeate every idea you get, every word you write, every picture you take, you are a phony and you ought to get out of the business.

Bill Bernbach
To succeed an ad (or a person or product for that matter) must establish its own unique personality, or it will never be noticed.

Bill Bernbach
There are few things more destructive than an unsound idea persuasively expressed.

Bill Bernbach
Finding out what to say is the beginning of the communication process. How you say it makes people look and listen and believe. And if you are not successful at that you have wasted all the work and intelligence and skill that went into discovering what you should say.

Bill Bernbach
Maybe we're getting bogged down in too much detail. Maybe our advertising ideas are being ground up in that multi-level American efficiency machine.

Bill Bernbach
The fragile structure of logic fades and disappears against the emotional onslaught of hushed tone, a dramatic pause, and the soaring excitement of a verbal crescendo.

Bill Bernbach
Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product. You are NOT right if in your ad you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.

Bill Bernbach
A dull truth will not be looked at. An exciting lie will. That is what good, sincere people must understand. They must make their truth exciting and new, or their good works will be born dead.

Bill Bernbach
Dullness won't sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.

Bill Bernbach
Advertising isn't a science. It's persuasion. And persuasion is an art.

Bill Bernbach
At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him.

Bill Bernbach
There is practically nothing that is not capable of boring us.

Bill Bernbach
More and more I have come to the conclusion that a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money.

Bill Bernbach
Working from a method or a formula is guaranteed to do the same thing to the effectiveness of an idea that time does to a loaf of bread. Ideas must be hot out of the oven if they are to arouse the appetite. That is why, in communications, imitation is commercial suicide.

Bill Bernbach
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.

Bill Bernbach
The men who are going to be in business tomorrow are the men who understand that the future, as always, belongs to the brave.

Bill Bernbach