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PRACTICE & PRACTITIONERS

"Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of foot-binding."

"The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference."

"To me, an advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission. A vice-president in an advertising agency is a 'molehill man.' A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 A.M. and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 P.M. to make this molehill into a mountain."

"In advertising there is a saying that if you can keep your head while all those around you are losing theirs - then you just don't understand the problem."

"When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either."

"Rarely have I seen any really great advertising created without a certain amount of confusion, throw-aways, bent noses, irritation and downright cursedness."

"The work of an advertising agency is warmly and immediately human. It deals with human needs, wants, dreams and hopes. Its 'product' cannot be turned out on an assembly line."

"The advertising man is a liaison between the products of business and the mind of the nation. He must know both before he can serve either."

"You see, advertising is a substitute for a salesperson, so it should be likeable. Who would buy from a salesperson who is rude, arrogant or insulting? People like to do business with people they like, therefore they respond to advertising created by people who like people."

"We see advertising actually creating and naming taboos. The most famous, B.O. and Halitosis, are archaeological specimens from an age which we might fix as either Late Iron Tonic or Early Soap . . . . Bad breath and body odor have always existed, of course, but as individual matters. To transfer them from personal idiosyncrasies into tribal taboos is a magicianly trick indeed."

"In American business today, with so many good companies offering bewilderingly similar products, advertising has become perhaps the critical factor in the consumer's decision of which one of those products to buy. The environment is not so much one of innovation as it is one of marketing - which means the adman, more than ever, has become its superstar."

"It used to be that a fellow went on the police force when everything else failed, but today he goes in the advertising game."

"Most fairly successful advertising men like to think that the composition of their copy involves enormous esthetic skills and they have a tendency to excuse the collecting of their exorbitant bribes on the ground that for the first time in history true genius is, at last, finding adequate compensation."

"[The advertiser] is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court."

"Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge of human nature, what dearly-bought experiences go into the making of an advertisement?

"That gentleman will call the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think they're scared of him. They're merely professional killers; he's in advertising!"

"The biggest problem which besets almost every agency is the problem of producing good campaigns. Copywriters, art directors, and television producers are easily come by, but the number of men who can preside over an agency's entire creative output - perhaps a hundred new campaigns every year - can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. These rare trumpeter swans must be capable of inspiring a motley crew of writers and artists; they must be sure-footed judges of campaigns for a wide range of different products; they must be good presenters; and they must have a colossal appetite for midnight oil."

"Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns."

"The business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull.... our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels."

"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."

"Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera."

"Managing an advertising agency isn't all beer and skittles. After fourteen years of it, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work."

"The number of agency people required to shoot a commercial on location is in direct proportion to the mean temperature of the location."

"Men now say that they are in the advertising business with just as much pride as the man who says, 'I am a professor at Yale,' or 'I am President of the United States.'"

"Advertising practitioners are interpreters. But unlike foreign language interpreters, adpeople must constantly learn new languages. They must understand the language of each new product, and speak the language of each new target audience."

"One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds provide."

"Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams - Joseph interpreting for Pharoah. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword."

"In the ad game, the days are tough, the nights are long, and the work is emotionally demanding. But it's worth it, because the rewards are shallow, transparent and meaningless."

"Don't tell my mother I'm in advertising. She thinks I play piano in a whore house."