Success Quote by Leo Burnett

The line is blunt enough to sound like a scolding, and that’s the point: Burnett is puncturing a romantic myth of marketing, the idea that brilliance alone moves product. In advertising, unused genius is indistinguishable from no genius at all. The sentence turns “good” into a practical category, not an artistic one. An ad isn’t good because it’s clever in a conference room; it’s good because it survives contact with reality and actually gets placed where people can see it.

The intent is managerial as much as motivational. Burnett is talking to clients and cautious executives who treat ad spend like a discretionary luxury and “waiting for the perfect moment” like prudence. He’s also speaking to agencies tempted to fetishize the work itself. The subtext: your internal taste doesn’t matter if distribution fails. Media buying, timing, repetition, and the willingness to commit are not boring add-ons; they are the mechanism by which persuasion becomes commerce.

Context matters. Burnett helped define mid-century American advertising, when mass media made national scale possible but also made hesitation costly. In that world, the unseen ad is a dead asset, like inventory locked in a warehouse. The quote reads like a small business truth but lands as a broader cultural diagnosis: modern capitalism rewards visibility as much as quality. If you’re not in the stream, you don’t exist.

It’s also a quiet defense of risk. Running the ad means accepting measurement, rejection, and embarrassment. Burnett is saying: don’t confuse fear of wasting money with strategy. In the attention economy, the only guaranteed way to not sell is to stay silent.