Success Quote by Morris Hite

Advertising loves the myth of the wizard: give a gifted agency a blank canvas and it will conjure desire out of thin air. Morris Hite punctures that fantasy with a businessman’s blunt accounting. His point isn’t just that “product matters.” It’s that advertising is downstream from reality, and the upstream work belongs to the client: make something people actually want, deliver it reliably, price it credibly, and treat customers like they’ll talk.

The line “It takes good clients to make a good advertising agency” quietly flips the power dynamic. Agencies are often treated as vendors whose job is to rescue a mediocre offering with cleverness. Hite insists the client is a co-author of the agency’s reputation. Great creative can’t out-run bad operations, weak differentiation, or a service experience that collapses on contact. When the product is wrong, advertising doesn’t fail silently; it amplifies the mismatch. The campaign becomes a spotlight on disappointment, accelerating churn and cynicism.

The subtext is also a warning about incentives. Agencies get paid to communicate, not to redesign supply chains or fix customer support. Clients who demand miracles are really outsourcing accountability. “Good clients” here means more than a healthy budget; it means strategic clarity, patience, and the willingness to hear uncomfortable truths about the offering itself.

Contextually, it’s a corrective to eras of hype-driven marketing and “growth at all costs.” Hite is arguing for a less glamorous, more durable equation: marketing doesn’t create value; it reveals it.