“I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.”
Bill Bernbach responds to the Bite-Sized Fiction blog, “The Creative Method,” as well as the state of advertising today.
From the book, “What Bill Said… “
“Working from a method or 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 can be commercial suicide.”
“It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and I’m so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.”
Research can be a trap:
“Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.”
“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.”
Reject conformity. If everyone tells you to do a thing, it’s a sure-fire way to irrelevance:
“It is one thing to have a selling proposition and quite another thing to sell it. Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.”
“Playing it safe can be the most dangerous thing in the world, because you’re presenting people with an idea they’ve seen before, and you won’t have any impact.”
“In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.”
“Today’s smartest advertising style is tomorrow’s corn.”
“Adapt your technique to an idea, not an idea to your techniques.”
The importance of creativity:
“To keep your ads fresh, you’ve got to keep yourself fresh. Live in the current idiom and you will create it. If you follow and enjoy and are excited by new trails in art, in writing, in industry, in personal relationships, whatever you do will naturally be of today.”
“Execution becomes content in a work of genius.”
“I can put down on a page a picture of a man crying, and it’s just a man crying. Or I can put him down in such a way as to make you cry. The difference is artistry – the intangible thing that business distrusts.”
Remember what our job is:
“Our job is to sell our client’s merchandise, not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify. To tear away the unrelated and pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.”
“Be provocative. But be sure your proactiveness stems from your product. You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You are right if you have him on his head to show how the product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.”
“The purpose of advertising is to sell. That is what the client is paying for and if that goal does not permeate everything you write, every picture you take, you are a phony and you ought to get out of the business.”