"Advertisements may be evaluated scientifically; they cannot be created scientifically"
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Bogart’s line slices through a comforting myth of modern business: that persuasion can be engineered the way a bridge is engineered. He grants the analytics crowd their territory - you can test recall, measure lift, run A/Bs, tally conversions - but he shuts the door on the fantasy that the act of making an ad can be reduced to a lab protocol. Evaluation belongs to science because it’s retrospective, measurable, and repeatable. Creation doesn’t, because it’s upstream of measurement, where language, taste, timing, and cultural noise decide what even counts as a “good” idea.
The subtext is a warning about category error. Scientific thinking is seductive in advertising because it promises certainty in a field built on uncertainty. But when you apply the logic of metrics too early, you don’t get “more scientific” creativity; you get safer, blander work that’s optimized to pass tests rather than to lodge in people’s lives. Bogart is arguing that the medium’s power comes from its irrational ingredients: surprise, humor, taboo, aspiration, annoyance, the little social signals that can’t be derived from a spreadsheet.
Context matters. Bogart wrote in an era when market research and mass media were professionalizing persuasion, and the industry was learning to justify itself in boardrooms. His sentence is a quiet rebuke to the managerial urge to domesticate imagination. You can measure the echo after the fact; you can’t manufacture the echo by measurement alone.
The subtext is a warning about category error. Scientific thinking is seductive in advertising because it promises certainty in a field built on uncertainty. But when you apply the logic of metrics too early, you don’t get “more scientific” creativity; you get safer, blander work that’s optimized to pass tests rather than to lodge in people’s lives. Bogart is arguing that the medium’s power comes from its irrational ingredients: surprise, humor, taboo, aspiration, annoyance, the little social signals that can’t be derived from a spreadsheet.
Context matters. Bogart wrote in an era when market research and mass media were professionalizing persuasion, and the industry was learning to justify itself in boardrooms. His sentence is a quiet rebuke to the managerial urge to domesticate imagination. You can measure the echo after the fact; you can’t manufacture the echo by measurement alone.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marketing |
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