Art & Creativity Quote by Morris Hite

Hite’s line is a deliberately bracing piece of sales-world demystification: the “magic” of advertising isn’t the prose, it’s the proposition. In one stroke he punctures the romantic fantasy of the lone copywriting genius and shifts the credit (and responsibility) back to the offer itself: the product angle, the promise, the price, the proof. If that core is strong, the words are just plumbing.

The secretary detail is doing cultural work. It’s a little sexist by today’s standards, but it also reveals the mid-century office hierarchy Hite came out of: the ad man as strategist, the secretary as execution. He’s not praising secretaries as hidden creatives; he’s using them as a rhetorical floor. If even the lowest-status writer in the room can “write your ad,” the idea must be doing almost all the heavy lifting.

Subtext: Hite is selling a worldview where marketing is closer to engineering than art. Reduce the problem to its lever, pull it hard, and the rest is formatting. That’s why the sentence lands with entrepreneurs and direct-response people who distrust brand perfume and award-show cleverness. It’s also a warning disguised as confidence: if your campaign needs literary fireworks to work, you’re compensating for a weak selling idea.

Context matters because Hite’s era prized measurable response: coupons, mailers, phone calls, orders. In that universe, an ad is a test, not a poem. His provocation still plays today in the age of templates and AI copy: tools can generate language endlessly; they can’t conjure a compelling offer from nothing. The idea is the scarce resource.