Life & Mortality Quote by William Bernbach

Advertising, at its best, is a kind of sanctioned necromancy: taking “dead facts” and making them walk around in public with pulse, desire, and consequence. Bernbach’s line works because it refuses the most flattering myth about his industry. He’s not talking about “truth” or “information,” the clean self-image of commerce. He’s admitting that facts, on their own, are inert. They don’t move people; they don’t compete with habit, boredom, or the thousand tiny distractions of modern life. The job, then, is not to invent reality but to animate it.

The intent is practical and insurgent. Bernbach helped pioneer the creative revolution of the 1960s, when agencies began treating copy and design as persuasion, not decoration. “Dead facts” are the product specs every competitor can list: mileage, ingredients, price. Bringing them “to life” means finding the human voltage inside them: the joke, the anxiety, the aspiration, the little story a buyer can recognize as their own. It’s a defense of imagination as a business tool, but also a warning: the creative act is powerful enough to distort, not just illuminate.

The subtext is an ethic, and a dare. If you can’t animate the facts, you don’t understand the audience. If you animate something that isn’t factual, you’ve crossed from craft into con. Bernbach stakes out the narrow ridge between persuasion and manipulation, implying that the best advertising doesn’t replace reality; it stages reality so people finally notice it.