Top 111 Quotes & Sayings by Jerry Della Femina
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman Jerry Della Femina.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
The object of advertising is to get people to feel better about the product you're selling.
I don't want people ever to think I'm not in advertising. It's such a business of enthusiasm that if you're not totally excited about it, you should leave it.
In our quest to tweet, like, and trend, we have forgotten that brands can be built through advertising. Ads can generate big ideas that can never be trumped by tactics. That is the magic of an ad, and that is what is missing from many ads today.
Probably the best advertising jobs of all are done by governments to convince people to go to war.
In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.
There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster.
Once people feel comfortable with something, they say, 'Let's try it.'
I gotta be involved. I still write ads; I still run around and rally the creative people.
Nobody can write a good 30-second commercial.
Humor works, and it's the best way to get attention without spending a lot of money.
Let's face it: in advertising, you are paid more, but you die younger. It's not very forgiving. Like sports stars, you're in it during your better years, and then you're out looking for work.
I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
The Democrats are going the way of Burma Shave and Crisco - products everyone loved and had in their homes. But they got old. They didn't have anything new to say about the product, and after awhile, they died.
I've seen very few Hispanics and blacks who have been able to work their way into the advertising end of business.
Pictures bring you inside, whether you see yourself driving a new car or as a hapless prisoner who is being abused.
I came into advertising in 1961. I had been turned down for jobs on the Ford account in the late Fifties as 'not their type.' If it hadn't been for Bill Bernbach, I would now be sitting in some luncheonette, continuing my life as a messenger.
Today's merger makers are not ad people; they're building communications companies.
Most of the people in advertising now - mention Bill Bernbach to them, they don't know.
If the FBI is now in charge of bad taste, we're all doomed.
It goes back to all of us wanting to be in Hollywood. We're all dying to win an Oscar.
Every automobile ad looks alike.
It is now possible to target adverts to the right person at the right time in the right place. But that is not enough.
The French are simply incapable of telling the truth.
Thank you for making me nouveau riche.
I'm careful to pay every single penny on my taxes. I don't have any money offshore.
Almost everything looks better from a distance, Long Island included.
Once you're not No. 1, it doesn't matter where you are.
I was the first advertising person who people could identify with.
I came from a poor family in Coney Island. I learned to write by reading the 'Post.' This was my education.
Sometimes you have to scare people to save their lives. But I'm very much against it if you're trying to sell a product.
Life was easy was back in the days before human resource departments controlled business and someone decided we all should be politically correct.
I don't like to work for politicians because I hate to work on anything that you can't give back if it doesn't work. I sell products. I do a commercial for, say, Meow Mix, and you don't like it, you get your money back. You can return it. Politicians, you can't return. You're with them for four more years. And that's scary.
Kids don't know what life was like without cell phones.
I ran for political office in the Hamptons once in a war I was having with the village. I came in, there were four people running, and I came in around third. It was over my food market - they arrested me. I just wanted to go for office because I thought it would be an interesting to do.
Advertising is what I do. It's got me everything I have, and I'm not going to leave it.
People who are visiting Long Island find it's very beautiful, and they are quick to try Long Island foods, wines and other products.
If you look at 'Mad Men,' it's set in the wrong decade. The style of Mad Men is really the 1950s, not the 1960s.
There's something that goes on in a new-business meeting that's wonderful to watch. It's like showtime. There are people who are nervous, and there are people who are jittery, and there's so much drama and so much at stake.
No kid ever graduated school and said, 'I want to go into advertising.' Advertising is almost everyone's second or third choice.
Husbands and wives fight, and when the wife is packing up, the husband says, 'Don't leave! I'm gonna change!' Marriages stay together because people promise to change.
No one wants to risk a million dollars on a few laughs. The big, flashy commercials are out. The soft sell is out.
People don't generally like advertising that takes a stand.
I've never met a client who wants to be the worst.
As long as the attitude is to only show the sheet metal, then automobile advertising will continue to be wretched.
At one point, I had over 800 employees, and I always paid all health care for my people - including a man who was my assistant who got HIV. I wound up paying his medical bills, which went into the hundreds of thousands. I'm not making myself out to be a saint. I did the right thing.
That's great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you'd want to spend more than three hours in.
Advertising should always be in good taste without a question.
My day is spent hiding from people.
I'm waiting for the candidate who says, 'I'm keeping things exactly the way they are. I like it this way.'
A lot of its readers are of an age where they forget to cancel.
Everybody makes a lot of money when the French come to town.
Sad to say, negative advertising really works.
If people ever talked the way advertising sounded, they would be put away.
I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and I'm a great believer that you can't have too conservative a President nor too liberal a Supreme Court. So I'm a walking contradiction. I believe that you should try to really protect people's rights in every way, and also, people should be allowed to do what they do.
I think people are getting bored of parties, and hosts are terrified nobody's going to show up. So they have to start entertaining them before the party even starts.
In my world - advertising - the Super Bowl is judgment day. If politicians have Election Day and Hollywood has the Oscars, advertising has the Super Bowl.
I am a temporary amusement.
The whole idea of a spokesman is a joke and a fraud if you drop someone like a hot potato if there's controversy.
Did I grow up thinking I'd ever be paged at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Did I ever think I'd make so much money writing ads? No.
The bad guys always fight dirty, and the good guys always fight clean.
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