HONESTY
"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, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.
"Regardless of the moral issue, dishonesty in advertising has proved very unprofitable."
Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 17.
"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country."
Raymond Chandler, U.S. author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
"The first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise . . . and cultivate the delightfully vague."
John Crosby (1947), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 70.
"Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."
Thomas Jefferson, quoted in H.L. Menchen, A New Dictionary of Quotations, 1946, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 17.
"Folks with their wits about them knew that advertisements were just a pack of lies - you had only to look at the claims of patent medicines!"
Frances Parkinson Keyes, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 70.
"In the ad biz, sincerety is a commodity bought and paid for like everything else."
Newsweek (1967), quoted in Wesley Douglas Comp, Comps Unfamiliar Quotations, 1990, New Jersey: Prentice Hall., p. 4.
"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."
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 57.
"Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out - either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it."
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 87.
"If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out - either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time."
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 87.
"There is one catagory of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections."
David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), New York: Vintage Books, p. 209.
"There is a huge difference between journalism and advertising. Journalism aspires to truth. Advertising is regulated for truth. I'll put the accuracy of the average ad in this country up against the average news story any time."
Jef I. Richards (1999), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
"If its not done ethically, advertising won't be trusted. If consumers don't trust it, advertising is pointless."
Jef I. Richards (2000), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
"Why, I ask, isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all by the advertising men who create it?"
David Riesman, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.
"Even if, as is generally the case, everything that the ad says about the product is scrupulously honest, or at any rate scrupulously avoids outright dishonesty, the implication of the direct address of most commercials - that the announcer speaks with the viewer's welfare at heart - is fraudulent."
Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 10.
"[L]ying and cheating in advertising, in the long run, are commercial suicide. Dishonesty in advertising destroys not only confidence in advertising, but also in the medium which carries the dishonest advertisement. . . . No one can be ill in a community without endangering others; no advertiser can be dishonest without casting suspicion upon others."
Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw Company, p. 437.
"The big print giveth and the small print taketh away."
Tom Waitts, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 1.