Success Quote by William Bernbach

Bernbach’s line is an elegant slap at advertising’s worst fantasy: that persuasion can replace reality. Coming from the man who helped modernize Madison Avenue, it lands less as moral scolding than as professional hygiene. He’s reminding his own industry that craft has limits, and that those limits are set by the product, not the pitch.

The first sentence punctures a common alibi in business culture: if something fails, it must have been “marketing.” Bernbach flips it. Skill can clarify, dramatize, even reframe, but it can’t conjure an actual advantage out of thin air. The subtext is almost anti-magic: the audience isn’t clay, and the market isn’t a stage where the cleverest copywriter wins by default. You can borrow attention for a while; you can’t borrow truth for long.

Then he tightens the screw with “gimmick.” That word is doing a lot of work. A gimmick isn’t merely dishonest; it’s structurally unstable. It implies short-term juice, engineered surprise, a trick designed to be noticed once. Bernbach is warning that gimmicks don’t just fail ethically, they fail mechanically: they “fall apart” because repetition exposes them, competitors copy them, and consumers eventually compare the promise to lived experience.

Context matters: Bernbach’s legacy (Volkswagen’s Think Small, among others) was built on candidness, restraint, and respect for the consumer’s intelligence. This quote is a defense of that revolution: great advertising doesn’t counterfeit value, it translates it.