“Advertising doesn’t create a product advantage. It can only convey it.” Bill Bernbach.
Now, many of you who are practicing modern day marketing might be saying to yourself, who the heck is Bill Bernbach. Well, it takes a real ad junkie to know that Bernbach was the godfather of modern advertising. One of the greatest ad men of all time and the creative force behind some of the most iconic campaigns ever produced.
And this quote? It may be more relevant today than when he first said it.
When Bill Bernbach uttered those words, computers were the size of a room. Ads were sketched with pen and paper, not built in Photoshop or Illustrator. Media buying meant print, radio, and television. “Digital marketing” wasn’t even a concept.
And yet, somehow, from the mad men days, he perfectly described the world we live in now.
Today, we have tools Bernbach couldn’t have imagined:
• Advanced SEO strategies
• Highly targeted paid search
• Precision audience segmentation
• Programmatic media buying
• Conversion tracking down to the click
We can optimize a website so thoroughly that search crawlers index every corner of it. We can engineer organic and paid search campaigns with surgical precision. We can place digital ads directly in front of a narrowly defined audience at exactly the right moment.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If the product isn’t truly great, none of the advantages mentioned above matters. Visibility does not equate to product success in the marketplace. A strong digital marketing plan accomplishes one critical thing: it gets your message in front of the right audience. That’s it.
It does not…
• Manufacture a competitive advantage
• Fix a weak value proposition
• Create differentiation where none exists
• Turn a mediocre solution into a must-have product
If your product lacks a clear and compelling Unique Selling Proposition (USP), marketing becomes expensive noise. Bernbach understood something foundational: advertising amplifies what is already there. If what’s there is exceptional, advertising becomes fuel. If what’s there is average, advertising simply accelerates disappointment.
In digital marketing, it’s easy to obsess over:
• Click-through rates
• Cost per acquisition
• Funnel optimization
• Attribution modeling
But before any of that, there’s a far more important question: Is this product meaningfully better? Because marketing can bring visitors, but only a great product convinces them to pull out their wallet.
At 78Madison, we love the craft of digital strategy. We believe in data. We believe in precision targeting. We believe in creative execution. But we also believe this: No campaign can compensate for a weak foundation.
The brands that win consistently are the ones that invest as deeply in product excellence as they do in marketing execution. When you combine a superior solution with a smart communications strategy, you don’t just generate traffic – you generate momentum.
Bernbach said advertising doesn’t create advantage, and he was right.
Our job isn’t to invent greatness…
It’s to reveal it.
Joe Bouch
CEO, 78Madison
78Madison is a full-service marketing communications firm (advertising agency) located in Winter Springs, Florida, a suburb of Orlando. Give us a shout, and lets start a conversation.