Success Quote by Jerry Della Femina

Advertising, in Jerry Della Femina's telling, is pleasure with a tie on: a slightly naughty thrill packaged as respectable work. The line crackles because it borrows the cadence of a bawdy one-liner while insisting on corporate legitimacy. "Honestly believe" is a wink, not a disclaimer; it signals that the speaker knows the claim is outrageous and wants you to enjoy the audacity of saying it out loud. The punch is in the boundary: "with your clothes on" frames the ad world as eroticized play, where desire, persuasion, and performance substitute for sex. You get the rush without the consequences, at least in theory.

The context is the Mad Men-adjacent era of American advertising, when agencies sold not just products but lifestyles, and the business styled itself as glamorous, fast-talking, and vaguely lawless. Della Femina, a self-mythologizing ad man, is also selling the industry to itself here: a recruitment pitch for talent who craves permission to be clever, shameless, and culturally central. Advertising becomes a sanctioned arena for manipulating attention and emotion, then calling it creativity.

The subtext is darker than the joke. If advertising is "fun", it is fun premised on control: making other people's wants legible, then rentable. The line flatters the practitioner as an artist and a hustler, while quietly normalizing the idea that seduction is a job description.