9 timeless marketing quotes that will always keep you effective

When I moved from brand-side FMCG to agency life, a few things changed. Sleep became a luxury, and when awake, which is now always, I became a student of marketing scripture, or, as a normal person would call me, boring.

I can’t go a day without having a “legendary” marketing quote forced upon me. And it was always paired with a dusty black-and-white picture of said icon. You can’t help but imagine them storming into rooms and dropping nuggets of wisdom. It’s enough to make you want to drop to your knees to recite verses of the Long and Short of It or go door-to-door converting our neighbors to the Church of Ehrenburg Bass.

The issue?

Not all quotes are profound. Or useful. And some are twisted to suit whatever someone is selling you.

So, I’ve hunted down the nine timeless quotes that reveal the core marketing principles that will never change. These are principles that allow marketers to focus on what we need to be doing rather than chasing new tools and metrics.

And before I dive in and have a love-in with adland’s past, I acknowledge the old white elephant in the room. I’ve dug out these quotes from an era rife with inequity and injustice. I hope that when I update this piece in 2070, the list will be much more vibrant and diverse. But there’s too much to learn from the past to cast it away.

However, if you can’t wait until 2070, you should just follow these clever people that I bet my house the industry will be quoting in years to come: Jenni Romaniuk, Ty Heath, Sarah Carter, Grace Kite, Karen Nelson-Field and Jo Arden. They are living and breathing these principles - and finding new ones. They’ll be in the 2070 article.

Now on to business.

Possibly the most important marketing truth is that you are not the customer.

Marketers think about their brands all day long. We are terrible at disconnecting and seeing things from the POV of those we are selling to.

If you understand that advertising competes with everything (movies, mates, books, Moo Deng, etc.), then you start creating advertising that earns attention, not assumes it. This is true marketing myopia.

It is hard to create a list like this and it not turn into an Ogilvy love-in. I promise I tried.

However, I use this quote weekly, so it’s on the list.

In advertising, we must find the drama. During the creative process, it’s essential to find the drama in the product or brand. Nuts make Snickers (sort of) more filling than the average chocolate bar. That’s not the ad.

The ad is about Snickers being your savior from hunger. Drama. Good strategy works out where the fire is and what’s worth saving, good advertising tells it in an entertaining and emotional way.

This is my favorite, and it’s not from an adman but a storyteller.

It’s about the generation effect. If you involve the viewer in your advertising and let them do a bit of the work, they will commit more of the ad to memory. Mark Ritson recently wrote a brilliant column on this.

It makes your ad live and breathe.

Similar to the generation effect, humor involves the viewer. There is ample evidence that humor makes advertising more effective. I like this quote because it does what people often struggle to do: It explains why humor works so well. It charms and disarms you.

This was my header on LinkedIn for about a year. It possibly the only quote on this list that gets aggressively more and more useful as time goes by. Marketers are now pipe-obsessed. They’ve become plumbers. Funnel this, funnel that, only concerned with how to get their advertising in front of the “right people”, as fast and cheap as possible.

But who cares how fast you can deliver total crap? All you have is an effective sewage system.

This is what the attention movement is all about, not all views are equal. But I’ve written research on this, working with Pinterest, to show that how ads make people feel determines sales results. Creative and media must work together. Watch me present it here.

This is something I go on and on about. A runner-up for this spot came from Ogilvy again: “If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling.”

Marketers have known it since the dawn of the term “brand management”. Consistency is how brands grow. As Orlando Wood puts it: “Familiarity breeds contentment”.

Mere exposure to the same ad creates liking. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Moving beyond using the same ad to the idea of creative consistency, I recently authored research with System1, using data from the IPA Effectiveness Databank. In ‘Compound Creativity,’ we show that advertising from brands that stick with the same positioning, idea, agency and assets works twice as hard, leading to double the reported very large profit gain. You can download that free here as well.

Half the job of brand managers is creating distinctiveness.

Standing out.

Looking like yourself.

Creating a meaningfully different brand, and then distinctly linking it to your assets.

This is a principle that will never die. Recently, Tupperware filed for bankruptcy as it failed to remember this. One of my favorite bits of TV has Noakes in it. Channel 4’s Mad Women explores how iconic women made some of the world’s most impactful advertising.

Technically, this very old quote is correct.

System1 tests most UK and US TV ads as they go live on air. 50% of all ads score 1 Star, which we predict will have no long-term impact on market share.

In fact, we recently showed that half of all recent creatively awarded ads score 1 Star. One of the key issues recently uncovered by Jon Evans, Peter Field and Adam Morgans is the extraordinary cost of dull. How the majority of emotions felt towards global advertising is just…apathy. Coming to terms with most advertising being very average really frames just how much things could change.

The temptation to render Rory in black and white to match his peers in the halls of ad quote Valhalla was there, but it would be disingenuous to represent TikTok’s new biggest star in such an old-school way.

I can’t find this one online, but I’ve had enough people quote this to me a lot in meetings to show that Rory doesn’t need 70 years to resonate.

Often, to achieve an entertaining brand-building campaign, to ignore the pull of short-termism and platform metrics, and to stick with what’s winning - a brave client has stuck their neck out to make it happen.

I’ve been there. It ain’t easy. You will rub people up the wrong way. Create more work. Do the right thing, not the easy thing. But you see it in the work. Most “advances” in marketing have been about removing risk. Proving to others that what you are doing works quickly. I do worry that this means we no longer value bravery.

What sets these nine marketing quotes apart is, I hope, a timelessness. At their core, they speak to fundamental principles of marketing and advertising that won’t change.

We could tire ourselves out chasing the new and focus on change. Or we can lean into principles that never change and understand which new tools can help solve these old problems better. After all, everything looks like a nail when all you have are various new hammers.

Editor’s note: I asked adland to share their fav quotes, with points for extra obscure options. You can see that here.

Read more from Tindall on Effectiveness here. Last week, he discussed how marketers need to break their fixation on short-termism, using pygmy hippos as a metaphor.