John Wanamaker

The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.

I really don’t retain information – by the time I arrive wherever I’m going, I already forget what it is that I wanted to say.

We were all young and we were all inventing our careers. I was very close to Jackson, just as I’d been very close to Laura Nyro. With each person I had a unique relationship.

Although Mr. Edison was called ‘The Wizard’ of the electrical world and everyone thought that electricity was the coming thing, he actually encouraged me to go with my second car.

Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

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.

Nobody buys a farm based on whether they think it’s going to rain next year. They buy it because they think it’s a good investment over 10 or 20 years.

If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.

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.

Without a customer, you don’t have a business, all you have is a hobby.

Mass production is craftsmanship with the drudgery taken out of it.

The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.

[On Laura Nyro] I said to Laura ‘You know Laura, I think we should sell your music publishing company. I think right now is the right time you have three songs in the top ten this may never happen again and I think we can get a lot of money for it.’ And I made a deal with Clive Davis to sell Tuna Fish Music for $4 million. And that was a hell of a lot of money in 1969. It made her famous, it made her rich. It got people to listen to her music with her singing.

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

We get real results only in proportion to the real values we give.