Bill Bernbach Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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 real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.

Bill Bernbach
It's that creative spark that I'm so jealous of for our agency and that I'm so desperately fearful of losing. I don't want scientists. I don't want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

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

Bill Bernbach
Getting a product known isn't the answer. Getting it WANTED is the answer. Some of the best known product names have failed.

Bill Bernbach
It is ironic that the very thing that is most suspect by business, that intangible thing called artistry, turns out to be the most practical tool available to it. For it is only an original talent that can vie with all the shocking news events and violence in the world for the attention of the consumer.

Bill Bernbach
It took millions of years for man's instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.

Bill Bernbach
However much we would like advertising to be a science - because life would be simpler that way - the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing art, defying formularization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; where what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.

Bill Bernbach
All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

Bill Bernbach
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.

Bill Bernbach
You've got to believe in your product... you've got to believe in your work. Only a deep belief will generate the vitality and energy that give life to your work.

Bill Bernbach
A great talent, sailing in the wrong direction will, like the lost pilot breaking the speed record, reach the wrong destination all the more quickly.

Bill Bernbach
Most readers come away from their reading not with a clear, precise, detailed registration of its contents on their minds, but rather with a vague, misty idea which was formed as much by the pace, the proportions, the music of the writings as by the literal words themselves.

Bill Bernbach
Logic and overanalysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea. It's like love-the more you analyze it the faster it disappears.

Bill Bernbach
A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.

Bill Bernbach
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.

Bill Bernbach
You've got to live with your product. You've got to get steeped in it. You've got to get saturated with it. You must get to the heart of it. Indeed, if you have not crystallized into a single purpose, a single theme, what you want to tell the reader, you CANNOT be creative.

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
Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.

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

Bill Bernbach
We think we will never know as much about a product as a client. After all, he sleeps and breathes his product. He's built it. He's lived with it most of his life. We couldn't possible know as much about it as he does. By the same token, we firmly believe that he can't know as much about advertising. Because we live and breathe that all day long.

Bill Bernbach
To keep your ads fresh you've got to keep yourself fresh. Live in the current idiom and you will create in it. If you follow and enjoy and are excited by the new trails in art, in writing, in industry, in personal relationships... whatever you do will naturally be of today.

Bill Bernbach
Knowledge is ultimately available to everyone. Only true intuition, jumping from knowledge to an idea, is yours and yours alone.

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
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
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
Find new symbols, even though in time those symbols will grow old and die. The most freshly sculptured phrase will eventually become a cliché.

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
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
Technique for its own sake can be disastrous. Because, after a while, you're so anxious to do things differently, and do them better and funnier and more brilliantly than the next guy, that becomes the goal of the ad, instead of the selling of the merchandise.

Bill Bernbach