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. – David Ogilvy
I was taken in by what might be called the Hard Times version of the Communists’ advertising or recruiting technique. – Elia Kazan
It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. – David Ogilvy
American advertisers rely on ‘essentially illogical’ approaches to determine their advertising budgets. – Michael Schudson
Trends in circulation and advertising – the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising-have created a palpable sense of doom. – Eric Alterman
Booksellers are tied to publishing – they need conventional publishing models to continue – but for those companies, that’s not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can’t afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market. – Nick Harkaway
Google (and Bing and Yahoo!) don’t ‘owe’ any company traffic. If a company has to spend more on advertising on Google, in addition to investing in search-engine-optimization, that is not a violation of any law. – Marvin Ammori
Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left. It’s totally dishonest. – David Ogilvy
The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century. – Daniel J. Boorstin
Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can’t. – Morris Hite
In advertising, you have a small window to say the most you can. That’s what songwriting is. The difference is, you get to put the leaves on the trees and colour ’em in. – Garth Brooks
And it’s interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or internet advertising, they were all right – they were just wrong in time. – Chris Anderson
The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising. – David Ogilvy
As advertising blather becomes the nation’s normal idiom, language becomes printed noise. – George Will
What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form. – David Ogilvy
Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous. – David Ogilvy
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising. – Pauline Kael
It takes good clients to make a good advertising agency. Regardless of how much talent an ad agency may have, it is ineffective without good products and services to advertise. – Morris Hite
Advertising holding companies used to boast about their share of the advertising market. Now they are proud of how much of their business is not in advertising. – Maurice Saatchi
We have always said that advertising is just the icing on the cake. It is not the cake. – Meg Whitman
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