When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either. – Leo Burnett
To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas. – Leo Burnett
A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain’t got nothin’. – Leo Burnett
I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than it is to write a good ad. – Leo Burnett
There’s no such thing as ‘hard sell’ and ‘soft sell.’ There’s only ‘smart sell’ and ‘stupid sell.’ – Leo Burnett
Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief. – Leo Burnett
The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which business renders. – Leo Burnett
I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one. – Leo Burnett
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. – Leo Burnett
Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret… to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink. – Leo Burnett
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people. – Leo Burnett
Anyone who thinks that people can be fooled or pushed around has an inaccurate and pretty low estimate of people – and he won’t do very well in advertising. – Leo Burnett
If you don’t get noticed, you don’t have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks. – Leo Burnett
If you can’t turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn’t be in the ad writing business at all. – Leo Burnett
I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death. – Leo Burnett
Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business. – Leo Burnett
We want consumers to say, ‘That’s a hell of a product’ instead of, ‘That’s a hell of an ad.’ – Leo Burnett
The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships. – Leo Burnett
I have learned to respect ideas, wherever they come from. Often they come from clients. Account executives often have big creative ideas, regardless of what some writers think. – Leo Burnett
Advertising says to people, ‘Here’s what we’ve got. Here’s what it will do for you. Here’s how to get it.’ – Leo Burnett
