Success Quote by Leo Burnett

The line lands like a rebuke to every brand that thinks it has “arrived.” Burnett, who helped invent modern American advertising’s folksy mythology (the Marlboro Man, the Jolly Green Giant), is warning that cultural attention has the shelf life of fresh bread. “Permanent” is the bait word: it exposes the fantasy that a clever campaign can harden into a timeless asset. In Burnett’s world, success is always provisional, because the public is always moving.

The specific intent is practical, almost managerial: don’t confuse a moment of market dominance with an enduring relationship. Advertising isn’t a monument; it’s maintenance. The subtext is sharper: if you’re winning, you’re also becoming predictable, and predictability is the first stage of irrelevance. A slogan that once felt like discovery eventually reads like a rerun. Competitors learn your tricks, audiences build immunity, and the media environment mutates underneath you.

Context matters. Burnett worked through the rise of mass consumer culture, when national brands could scale fast on radio, print, and television. That era tempted companies to believe in set-and-forget persuasion: buy enough airtime, repeat the same story, own a category. Burnett’s sentence punctures that confidence. He’s also quietly defending creativity as a discipline, not a one-off burst. If success can’t be permanent, then the job isn’t to protect yesterday’s campaign; it’s to keep earning relevance without chasing novelty for its own sake.

It’s an anti-complacency mantra from an architect of the very machine that sells complacency. That tension is the point.