Time & Perspective Quote by William Bernbach

Bernbach’s line is an elegant demolition of the industry’s favorite security blanket: the idea that “good” advertising is a stable category you can certify like a warranty. He insists the ad isn’t the product; the moment is. Taste shifts, media habits mutate, scandals erupt, slang flips meanings, and suddenly yesterday’s “effective” message reads as tone-deaf, manipulative, or just tired. By framing quality as time-bound, he’s also reframing creativity as a form of cultural listening rather than aesthetic self-expression.

The sting is in the final sentence. “Research can trap you into the past” isn’t an anti-data tantrum; it’s a warning about what research is structurally built to do: measure what already exists. Surveys and focus groups reward familiarity, punish surprise, and translate human ambiguity into tidy preferences. They excel at describing current consensus, not at predicting what people will want after you’ve changed the conversation. Bernbach, the creative force behind Doyle Dane Bernbach and the midcentury “Creative Revolution” (Volkswagen’s Think Small, Avis’ We Try Harder), is defending work that looked wrong to conventional testing precisely because it broke with conventional claims and corporate puffery.

Subtext: advertising is cultural production with consequences, not just persuasion engineering. If you outsource judgment entirely to retrospective proof, you don’t just avoid risk; you forfeit the only advantage advertising can still have in a noisy marketplace: a timely, human point of view.