Success Quote by William Bernbach

Bernbach’s line is a velvet-gloved threat: you can have the cleanest strategy deck, the most elegant positioning, the most rigorous research, and it still doesn’t matter if nobody looks up. “Academic” is the knife twist. He’s not praising learning; he’s demoting it to an after-the-fact consolation prize - impressive, correct, and useless in the marketplace. The intent is to re-center advertising around its only real gatekeeping metric: attention.

The subtext is a rebuke to the comforting bureaucracy of marketing, the corporate reflex to treat persuasion like accounting. Bernbach, a founding figure of the 1960s “creative revolution” (Doyle Dane Bernbach; Volkswagen’s Think Small), was fighting an era of loud, formulaic ads that assumed repetition could substitute for originality. His point isn’t merely that ads should be “noticed,” but that being noticed is the precondition for every other virtue we like to celebrate: truth, craft, cleverness, even ethics. If the message never lands, you don’t get credit for having the right message.

Context matters: postwar mass media was consolidating attention into a few national channels, which made the competition for notice brutally direct. Bernbach understood that in a world of abundant messages, the scarcest commodity is not information but receptivity. He also understood something more uncomfortable: “noticed” can reward the sharp and the shallow alike. The line dares you to pursue attention without hiding behind process - and quietly asks whether your work can earn attention without resorting to noise.