The line ran across the bottom of every Lennen & Mitchell ad in 1928: An Advertising Agency in Which the Principals Do the Work. That single sentence sold the agency for the better part of half a century.In 1972 the agency filed the biggest bankruptcy in advertising history....

Picture a house in a quiet California suburb. Trimmed hedges, clean driveway, the kind of lawn a person spends Saturday mornings protecting from dandelions. Now picture a billboard — massive, crudely painted, blocking nearly the entire front view — screaming DRIVE CAREFULLY in...

Your customer has ordered the pie. The waiter now has two ways to sell the ice cream. The first is to ask whether they want any. That question has a one word answer, and most of the time the answer is no. Not because the diner dislikes ice cream. Because no is the cheapest thing to...

The carbon lamp had been losing for years.Every lighting manufacturer knew the tungsten filament was better — brighter, more efficient, cheaper to run. They said so in their advertising. They’d been saying so for years.Nobody particularly believed it.Then Claude Hopkins sat...

Why defending yourself in the reply box costs you customers — and what to write instead Her fingers were on the keyboard. The review had been up six hours.“Terrible experience. Staff were rude and unprofessional. Would never...

Sam Jones told you himself, over the garden fence, with the confidence of a man who has never been wrong about anything:“You’ll never catch me getting stuck with a set of books. Matter of fact, I hear the salesman’s still in the neighbourhood. Hope, for his sake, he...

The ad is printed. The email is sent. The campaign is live.Nothing is happening.Not yet. Not until the ad gets off the page. The most important idea in advertising that nobody talks about...

He’s staring at the dashboard. Numbers are green. ROAS is acceptable. The agency report landed in his inbox this morning with three highlighted wins and a confident subject line.“Must be working,” he says.Clyde Bedell heard that sentence in 1964 and called it what...

“We know what it takes to be a Tiger.”“In business people are good together.”“Hello.”Walk through any international airport terminal and you are surrounded by millions of dollars of advertising that says nothing at all. Enormous backlit panels....

The soundman had tears in his eyes. “Nice thing you did for Sam,” he said.Billy Crystal had no idea what he was talking about. He’d barely met Sammy Davis Jr. before this gig—a month-long residency at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, Crystal opening, Sammy headlining,...