quotations about advertising
Advertising is immodesty turned to profit.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
The art of advertisement ... has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Promise as an Institution", The Doom of Youth
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
JOHN LAHR
The Guardian, Aug. 1989
I gave someone a perverse argument not so long ago about why advertising is better than movies. You want to hear it? Movies operate from a really disingenuous premise, that people are heroes. I know a lot of people and have had an opportunity over the years to observe them. Are they heroes...? Let's put it this way. Advertising tries something simpler and more believable: Products as heroes. I guess the idea is: When all else fails, put your faith in conditioner.
ERROL MORRIS
Boards Magazine, Aug. 1, 2000
Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.
PAUL GRAHAM
"How to Start a Startup"
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
TED TURNER
Call Me Ted
When advertising is great advertising, it fastens on the myths, signs, and symbols of our common experience and becomes, quite literally, a benefit of the product.... As a result of great advertising, food tastes better, clothes feel snugger, cars ride smoother. The stuff of semiotics becomes the magic of advertising.
CURT SUPLEE
attributed, Persuasion: Reception and Responsibility
What we used to call advertising is evolving into something far more personal and ubiquitous. You may not like it, but you'd better be ready for it.
CHUCK PORTER
attributed, Beyond Advertising: Creating Value Through All Customer Touchpoints
Recent reports suggest that Clear Channel is partnering with certain mobile services to track Americans' travel patterns and consumer behavior through their phones. By compiling location and demographic data from these sources, Clear Channel intends to provide advertisers and retailers with more information about who is seeing their billboards and whether they visit a particular store after viewing the advertisement. Access to this information in turn allows advertisers and retailers to better target their audience. When done appropriately, targeted advertising may provide consumer benefits, but we must ensure that Americans' very sensitive information, including their location data, is protected.
AL FRANKEN
letter to Clear Channel CEO Scott Wells, February 29, 2016
Many nations of consumers talk and live like ads. Advertising is not just a mirror but also a perceptioncreator. It makes and moulds generations of attitudes.
HARISH BIJOOR
"In Indian advertising, diversity is reduced to cultural stereotypes", Economic Times, February 17, 2016
Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for millions. Advertising is the Archimedean lever that is moving the world. If things were done in another and elder age that advertising is doing now, a whole mythology would gather about it, and we should witness the birth of a young God--powerful, restless, indomitable and wise, dominating. He would flash in the sylvan glades of the want advertisements and disport himself in the sunny whiteness of the department stores' wide spaces. But what a god he would be! How beneficent, how omnipresent, how powerful!
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
attributed, New York Magazine, Jun. 10, 1968
Advertising is the best insurance that you can take out on your business. You can buy fire insurance on your stock of goods, but no company will issue a policy covering your business, the good will as they sometimes call it. You must insure yourself, and the best way to do it is by advertising. Good advertising kept up for a number of years gives you something that no fire can take away.
FRANK FARRINGTON
The Spatula, May, 1909
Advertising is not a rifle; it is a shotgun, and any campaign featuring outdoor boards of a cartoon animal inevitably will catch children in its spray.
BOB GARFIELD
attributed, Deadly Persuasion
There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.
CARL SAGAN
Contact
Advertisers like to tell parents that they can always turn off the TV to protect their kids from any of the negative impact of advertising. This is like telling us that we can protect our children from air pollution by making sure they never breathe. Advertising is our environment. We swim in it as fish swim in water. We cannot escape it. Unless, of course, we keep our children home from school and blindfold them whenever they are outside of the house. And never let them play with other children. Even then, advertising's messages are inside our intimate relationships, our homes, our hearts, our heads.
JEAN KILBOURNE
Can't Buy My Love
The advertisements in a newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Much brass has been sounded and many cymbals tinkled in the name of advertising; but the advertisements which persuade people to act are written by men who have an abiding respect for the intelligence of their readers, and a deep sincerity regarding the merits of the goods they have to sell.
BRUCE FAIRCHILD BARTON
The Man Nobody Knows
I had never thought of advertising as a life work, though I had on the side, written some very successful copy.
BRUCE FAIRCHILD BARTON
attributed, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators
I find that I am growing in the advertising business in proportion as I realize and expound the theory and practice that there is no such thing as advertising.
THOMAS E. DOCKRELL
Annual Convention of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
The Perfect Salesman