Dr. Gallup reports that if you say something which you don’t also illustrate, the viewer immediately forgets it. I conclude that if you don’t show it there is no point in saying it. Try running your commercial with the sound turned off; if it doesn’t tell without sound, it is useless.

The first, a quote from Voltaire, is contemptuous: “Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.” The second, an adage from the advertising profession, is tactical: “If you can’t make your case to an audience with facts, sing it to them.

Sometimes people ask songwriters what a song means, not realizing if they had more words to explain it they would’ve used them in the song.

You have to think not about what you mean but about what people hear.

I saw a commercial on late night TV, it said,"Forget everything you know about slipcovers." So I did. And it was a load off my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, and I didn't know what the hell they were.

Nobody wants a sales pitch. So instead of trying a hard sell, focus on telling a story that captivates your audience by painting a vivid picture of your vision. When you get good at storytelling, people want to be part of that story, and they’ll want to help others become part of that story too.

Is it me, or do commercials have nothing to do with the products anymore? You dig? I don't even know what a fucking commercial is about until the end. Every one is a surprise nowadays. You seen that commercial where the lady got the black eye? This lady comes on TV with a black eye, she's crying, she's like, "I smoke crack. And my husband beats me." And then a voice came on and said, "Got milk?"

Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn’t mean you’ve reached them. With reading comprehension being what it is in the U. S., you can safely toss that one out the window. If you want to judge by the listening habits of people who buy records, the first thing they do is put it on and talk over it.

The purpose of a commercial is not to entertain the viewer but to sell him. Horace Schwerin reports that there is no correlation between people liking commercials and being sold by them. But this does not mean that your commercials should be deliberately bad-mannered. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that it pays to make them human and friendly, if you can do so without being unctuous.

A radio in a song in an ice cream cone. Two licks for free, and the third is for sale. My favorite flavor tastes like a commercial, because it’s made with 100% natural advertisement.

Sometimes you say things in songs even if there's a small chance of them being true. And sometimes you say things that have nothing to do with the truth of what you want to say and sometimes you say things that everyone knows to be true. Then again, at the same time, you're thinking that the only truth on earth is that there is no truth on it. Whatever you are saying, you're saying in a ricky-tick way. There's never time to reflect. You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did.

(After Houston asks the audience in Central Park to sing along to a new, un-aired song) And the poor gays with the signs are like "We don't know that song yet....it's not even (on the radio)...go Diva....I mean, we don't know that song. I would like to...I don't...??"

A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.

Most people, nowadays, don’t even know that they know the song. Whiffenpoof is just an alien word to them. But start singing “We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way” and you pretty much guarantee that they will reply, “Baa! Baa! Baa!