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Half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half.

The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.

Studies have shown that the male sees his relationship to others in terms of higher-lower, faster-slower, first-second. A female sees her relationships in less competitive terms: similar to-different from, know her-don't know her. Thus advertising that says others will be jealous if you own this product works with men, but is off-putting to women. Women want to be able to say: "Yep, that's my life. If that product works for her, it'll probably work for me." Women also relate better to "warmer" than to "winner."

If you want to write good promotional material, remember this cute little phrase: features smell, benefits sell. It's easy to turn a feature into a benefit. Just add a "so" at the end of the feature and fill in the blank.

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A promotion is worthless if it doesn't translate interruption into a permission given. If all you do is interrupt, then it's a waste of time.

In practice, there is no generalizable evidence on any lasting persuasive effects of advertising - at least not enough to justify a global spend of billionsÂ… Advertising lacks consistently dynamic effects because of, once again, competition. Your competitors' omnipresent retail availability, quality control, category management, CRM, promotion, and advertising all interfere. Left to itself, advertising your brand would, of course, work wonders.

Realistically, I maintain that advertising works as paid-for creative publicity. A competent ad automatically publicizes its brand and brand name. Ads can create and refresh memory traces and associations. True results can be rediscovered often. But often they aren't. This kind of publicity can then affect whether consumers find the brand salient, familiar, and reputable - in short, a brand they may want to buy. Indeed, the more alike two brands are, the more effective creative publicity can be, as it is virtually the only thing that separates them, in both the short term and the long term.

The realistic task for advertising is not to change what people think about your brand, which is always hard to achieve, but to have them think about your brand at all. As Dr. Johnson said almost 300 years ago, "Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed."