One of his more controversial assertions was that "originality" is the most dangerous word in advertising.  He claimed that the egos of some copywriters caused them to value the creativity of the ad over the selling message about the product, which results in the waste of clients' money.

Rosser Reeves book portrays him as a practical advertiser, with a lot of common sense, and a distaste for "show window" ads which merely make the product look pretty, but contain no selling message.  He had little tolerance for people who wrote about advertising without understanding it the way he did.  For example, he scoffed at Vance Packard’s book Hidden Persuaders, which claimed that advertising unfairly played on the mass's unconscious motivations.  Reeves pointed out that individuals spend fortunes and years on the analyst's couch to understand their own deeper motivations, so it was preposterous to assume that an advertising copywriter understood the subconscious motivations of millions of people.  Reeves called Hidden Persuaders "gibberish."

In his book Reality in Advertising, Reeves also attacked John Kenneth Galbraith's assertion that advertising’s "central functions is to create desires -- to bring into being wants that previously did not exist."  According to Reeves, "if the product does not meet some existing desire or need of the consumer, the advertising will ultimately fail."

Reeves pointed out that,  "New forms of transportation do not create the desire for transportation...Do not confuse a type of shoe with the desire for shoes.  Do not confuse a method of labor saving with the desire not to be a drudge.’  As for Galbraith’s assertion that products are not needed, Reeves quoted Pat Steel, "People don’t really need these things.  People don’t really need art, music, literature, newspapers, historians, wheels, calendars, philosophy...All that people really need is a cave, a piece of meat, and possibly, a fire."