quotations about advertising
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
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Atoms of Thought: An Anthology of Thoughts
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
The Perfect Salesman
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 to the uninterested is wasted. Unfortunately, in the digital world, even though wasting advertisers' money is a concern, wasting the time of the audience is damaging the medium itself. Lack of relevance led to the attention arms race -- the cause of much of the irritation of today's ads. Advertisers went from static banners to ever more attention-grabbing formats: animations, popups, pop-unders, interstitials etc. Each of these gave a temporary lift, but the underlying irrelevance meant the lift was temporary. The end result is that consumers have been trained to ignore ads.
DEREK HARDING
"Ad Blocking Is A Symptom, Not The Disease", Media Daily News, March 2, 2016
The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife.
DAVID OGILVY
Confessions of an Advertising Man
Advertising is prima facie evidence that the man who pays believes that advertising is good. It has brought great results to others, it must be good for him. So he takes it like some secret tonic which others have endorsed. If the business thrives, the tonic gets the credit. Otherwise, the failure is due to fate.
CLAUDE C. HOPKINS
Scientific Advertising
Advertising is an addiction: Once you're hooked, it's very difficult to stop. You become accustomed to putting a fixed advertising cost into your budget, and you are afraid to stop because of a baseless fear that, if you do, your flow of new customers will dry up and your previous investments in advertising will have been wasted.
MICHAEL PHILLIPS & SALLI RASBERRY
Marketing Without Advertising
Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant.
BRENDA UELAND
If You Want to Write
A mistake most civilians make about advertising is that they think it is a writing profession. Wrong! Even for copywriters, it is an idea profession. This is why Ivy honors grads fail and fail again at ad careers. They end up writing overthought and overwrought 27-word headline ads that make sense only to them. Stick to blogging jobs, lit majors.
MARK DUFFY
"Copyranter: The one secret to all great advertising, revealed", Digiday, February 26, 2016
Advertising is no longer preoccupied with the staging of the commodity. Instead advertising is the prefiguration of the commodity's empty form.
PAMELA ODIH
Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times
What were habitually his final meditations? Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Although contemporary advertising is relatively young, it already has a considerable tradition. Each new ad is encountered against a background of thousands of earlier ads.
GUY W. D. COOK
The Discourse of Advertising
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
I've met many an advertising professional who thought 'Half my advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half' was funny. It isn't. In this day and age, it's a disgrace, an appalling indictment of the bad habits we have all got into, that we don't know, even now, whether it's half, or a third, or a quarter -- or three quarters, for that matter. All we know for certain is that advertising is working even less efficiently for us now than it did 20 years ago.
MARCUS OSBORNE
Stop Advertising Start Branding
The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
BILL COSBY
attributed, How to be an Entrepreneur and Keep Your Sanity
In many ways, mobile video advertising is a more advisable option than TV advertising. This is because on the mobile platform brands are able to identify unique users, and as such are able to offer them tailored advertising which is both relevant and timely. This identification even extends to user preferences based on their previous activity, and is far greater than for television, where brands can't establish exactly who and how many people are watching their advert at any given time. If anything, it highlights the 'con' of TV buying, which is based on loose estimations of audience figures, derived from surveying a small proportion of the population and scaling the results up to reflect the entire country.
WILL PROOPS
"Why Mobile Video is the Best Route to Improved Brand Engagement", Performance In, March 4, 2016
Advertising is like oxygen, you can't survive without it.
DONALD E. HULTS
Unseen Untold is Unsold
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
attributed, Subliminal Seduction