Advertising Consumerism Quotes

If you've ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don't have to tell you, that's not what's done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.

That's not what an ad for a car is - an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you've ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices - that's what advertising is. ~ Noam Chomsky

The typical person saw over 5,000 advertisements yesterday telling them to buy something new.

Here's 1 with the opposite message: Buy Less. ~ Joshua Becker

Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago. ~ Kalle Lasn

In the advertisement, anonymous hands wielded shiny shiny blades that chopped through butter and animal bone as if they were the same thing, through ice and tendon and untreated wood as if there was no difference between anything in the world - only a slight variation in grain, visible once something has been split in half. ~ Alexandra Kleeman

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going. ~ Herman E. Daly

Fifteen Minutes of Notoriety Beats the Best Advertising Money Can Buy ~ Ernie J Zelinski

Or, if you want to go just a wee bit deeper, we could talk about the nature of freedom itself. Does freedom mean that you are allowed to do whatever you want to do? Or we could talk about all the limiting influences in your life that actively work against your freedom. Your family genetic heritage, your specific DNA, your metabolic uniqueness, the quantum stuff that is going on at a subatomic level where only I am the always-present observer. Or the intrusion of your soul's sickness that inhibits and binds you, or the social influences around you, or the habits that have created synaptic bonds and pathways in your brain. And then there's advertising, propaganda, and paradigms. Inside that confluences of multifaceted inhibitors," she sighed, "what is freedom really? ~ Wm. Paul Young

Funny how you never hear novelists or painters say they work in the 'creative industries', but only squalid little advertising people. How could this be? (.....)

If you listen to advertisers, you'd think they're the fucking Oracle and that for a fee they'll slip you the Answer. They are obsessed with being seen as 'creative', but what they do seems rather to be 'parasitical' : pinching cultural innovations and using them to persuade people that they want stuff. So there's a dilemma for us all to think 'creatively' about. ~ Steve Lowe

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e., of advertising. ~ Anonymous

The world had gone mad, and in may parts of Europe, advertising your love of Jesus Christ was like painting a bull's-eye on the roof of your car. ~ Dan Brown

The problem with Marxism is the proletariat isn't going to rise up against capitalism and consumerism. The only time they'll rise up is during a commercial break to either go to the bathroom or grab more beer. ~ Jarod Kintz

I could get a job in an advertising agency. I'll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness. ~ Sloan Wilson

I've been doing documentaries for about 25 years and want to continue to do that, but I love the idea of working in a different medium. Advertising pushes the envelope creatively, and there is some really great work being done right now, so I'm excited to jump into it. ~ Rory Kennedy

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save. ~ Erich Fromm

The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference. ~ Fred Allen

The biggest mistake businesses make is advertising before they have become well known. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer

The record labels used to spend money on advertising, and social media has replaced that entirely - it's putting magazines out of business. It's put big companies into completely reinventing their strategies. ~ Steve Aoki

To argue a moral position convincingly these days requires that one speak to (and not depart from) people's love of material well-being, their fascination with efficiency, or their fear of death. ~ Langdon Winner

Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society will very quickly grind to a halt. On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants and private equity directors had disappeared, society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better. So, ~ Owen Jones

As consumers, we're too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we're desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems. ~ Seth Godin

The most advertised commodity is not always intrinsically the best; but is sometimes merely the product of a company, with plenty of money to spend on advertising. ~ Emily Post

The Machiavelli of the 20th century will be an advertising man, his Prince, a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time. ~ Aldous Huxley

We've weathered several periods when times weren't so good, and so I don't think we'll cancel our advertising now. In fact, we might even increase it. ~ Will Keith Kellogg

Such exaggerations have been so common that the public takes them with a grain of salt and partly excuses them as being due to the advertiser's license of self-assertiveness. Nevertheless, the fact remains that superlative generalities are weak arguments and far less convincing than a statement of facts. Much advertising copy would be improved immensely by doing away with brag and substituting actual facts about the merits of the article. ~ Daniel Starch

Differentiation is a zero-sum, advertising-based game. ~ Seth Godin

Ambition is greed without makeup. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The advent of Google+ and the emergence of the personalized web means this is more true than ever. Brands, and their advertising partners, must wake up to this challenge and define themselves with clarity, consistency and authenticity. Otherwise they just might find themselves shouting in a ghost town. ~ Simon Mainwaring

I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death. ~ Leo Burnett

The system of consumerism may seem like an immovable fact of modern life. But it is not. That the system was manufactured suggests that we can reshape those forces to create healthier, more sustainable system with a more fulfilling goal than 'more stuff ~ Rachel Botsman

The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope.

We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry. ~ Aldous Huxley

I don't know what young fellows want to go in for those sort of things for?" I said. "Wars are a waste of time; and advertising is all lies." "I am afraid, my dear Mister Le Page," he said, looking very sorry for me, "you are an anachronism. ~ G.B. Edwards

Poker is a shifty game played by shifty characters. Outside the two official card rooms in London, most games take place in illegal spielers with heavy rake money. Debts and revenges are rife, names are changed, multiple passports are not unheard of. The majority of regular players have no interest in advertising their lifestyle, their whereabouts or even their existence to tax inspectors, thieves, neighbours, creditors or old enemies. Television? You'd have to be a complete ice cream. ~ Victoria Coren

They say that Madison Avenue will only pay high dollars in advertising if they get the 18-35 age range. ~ Sharon Gless

It's smart to be thrifty. ~ Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets ~ Aneurin Bevan

The censors were great. There's always back and forth. But it's Hostel 2, it's not Happy Feet 2. Everybody knows what Hostel is and people that are going to see it are going for more of what they loved in the original. No one is accidentally going to walk into it, no parent is accidentally going to take their child, and we're not pretending what it is in the advertising. We're saying it's very violent, it's very scary and a continuation of the first one. ~ Eli Roth

I'm thinking we ought to rethink the whole self-esteem thing. It should almost be a dirty word. I mean, look at Kayla. She has the intelligence of a tree stump, and its sense of humour. She's less about real attractiveness than she is about advertising ... She's the kind of girl who shows how hot she is because she has nothing else to offer, who doesn't realise that hotness has an expiration date. Yet, I'm still a little nervous talking to her like she's holding a lottery ticket she just might or might not decide to hand over to me. It is nuts, if you stop to think about it. I give give her this power, and it's kind of like voting some idiot into office. But hey, we're good at that, too. ~ Deb Caletti

Escape is a commodity like anything else. ~ Iain M. Banks

Commercial interests with their advertising industry do not want people to develop contentment and less greed. Military interests in economic, political, ethnic or nationalist guises, do not want people to develop more tolerance, nonviolence and compassion. And ruling groups in general, in whatever sort of hierarchy do not want the ruled to become too insightful, too independent, too creative on their own, as the danger is that they will become insubordinate, rebellious, and unproductive in their alloted tasks. ~ Robert Thurman

Have you ever had a lyric from a really crappy song or advertising jingle get stuck in your head? Something that just won't go away, no matter how much you don't want it to be there?

Imagine if, instead of a silly piece of music, it was an image. Imagine that image was something you found disturbing; say, rivers of rich burgundy blood gushing from slashes in your forearms.

What if, instead of this being a fleeting, irritating image, it took hold in your mind. It would be there on waking, it would push itself into your thoughts while you were watching television, driving, sitting at your desk. What if, gradually, your mind became your own personal continuously screening horror movie, starring yourself.

What would you do? Would you feel compelled to act on these thoughts? Do you think, if you did, it would help? Would you think yourself mad?

Would you tell anyone? ~ Victoria Leatham

A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable. ~ Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

What advertising dum-dum signed up Ilie Nastase to sell a resort?! Who'd want to go where he's at? ~ Malcolm Forbes

Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special. ~ Fran Lebowitz

In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us. ~ George Saunders

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. ~ Andy Warhol

I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

In general, advertising isn't a "creative" atmosphere. It's a business atmosphere and your job is puzzle solving. My favorite aspect of the business, I guess, was presenting to clients. What I enjoyed least were the clients. Worried corporate brand managers, trying to dumb-down their ads for the stupid American population. I hated the disrespect that these people had for "consumers." ~ Augusten Burroughs

As I see it, fast food outfits have targeted small children with their advertising in a very effective way. You know, it's clowns and kid's toys and bright colors and things like that. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Every time a man puts a new idea across, he faces a dozen men who thought of it before he did. But they only thought of it. ~ Oren Arnold

The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercized in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions. ~ Samuel Johnson

If we are to have a stabilized market demand, selling pressure should be maintained ... perhaps increased ... at the first sign of a decline in business. I know of no single way business managers can do more to stabilize market demand than through greater stabilization of sales and advertising expenditures. ~ Paul G. Hoffman

BABY BOY, FASHION IS NOT FOR ADVERTISING YOUR FAVE SEX ACTS ON YOUR SHIRT. UNH-UNH, NO IT'S NOT ! ~ Lauren Weisberger

I don't believe in tricky advertising, I don't believe in cute advertising, I don't believe in comic advertising. The people who perpetrate that kind of advertising never had to sell anything in their lives ~ David Ogilvy

The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time. ~ Thomas Jefferson