Success Quote by William Bernbach

Bernbach’s warning lands like a polite slap to the era that wanted to turn persuasion into engineering. Mid-century America was intoxicated by measurement: surveys, motivation research, demographic slicing, the comforting idea that if you just fed enough data into the machine, the public would reliably spit out purchases. Against that backdrop, “advertising is a science” isn’t just a claim; it’s a sales pitch from the industry to itself, a way to make something messy sound professional, predictable, and billable.

The intent is defensive and liberating at once. Bernbach isn’t anti-intellectual; he’s anti-certainty. He’s guarding the creative act from being smothered by committees, “best practices,” and the false neutrality of numbers. In a business built on risk, calling it a science is a way to dodge blame when work fails (“the data told us”) and to launder subjectivity into authority (“the research proves it”). Bernbach is naming that maneuver and refusing it.

Subtext: people aren’t lab rats, culture isn’t a controlled environment, and the most important forces in persuasion - taste, timing, humor, desire, status anxiety - don’t hold still long enough to be pinned down. Science seeks repeatability; advertising lives on novelty. What worked yesterday becomes background noise tomorrow.

Coming from the architect of the “creative revolution,” the line also reads as a power play: give artists and writers room to gamble, because the audience’s imagination can’t be focus-grouped into existence. Bernbach is telling clients and colleagues to stop mistaking precision for truth, and to remember that the real instrument in advertising isn’t the spreadsheet. It’s human attention.