Advertising Quotes

Advertising is in essence simply a means of communication through mass media which is available to anyone who can pay for it. It is, in this sense, rather like electricity, which can be used to work a refrigerator or a dentist's drill. ~ John Treasure

I got my start in the 'New York Times' because I used to read Stuart Elliot, the advertising columns. I still do. And I read him so religiously, I wanted to work for him before I died. ~ Andrew Ross Sorkin

When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your custo ~ Steven Johnson

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

Lady Gaga is a pop prostitute, a satanic b
with her fascist and demonic secret signs! Her pop prostitution has more to do with bikini advertising than with warmth, ~ Nina Hagen

Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor. ~ Clare Boothe Luce

Actually, no. I won't ever go digital. I work with thirty-five or large format. I like the hand-jobs, you know. And I still do most of my own printing. I've developed such a profound distaste for touch-up and modern artifice - comes from snapping too many derelicts and detritus, perhaps, but I love it. Photo bloody Shop can go stuff it. A picture should be honest, even if the subject is contrived on the ground, you know; not dolled-up for advertising punch or sex appeal. ~ Pansy Schneider-Horst

The first lesson of branding: memorability. It's very difficult buying something you can't remember. ~ John Hegarty

Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you. Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before. ~ William Bernbach

Most advertisers spend millions upon millions of dollars to buy commercial time during the Super Bowl, and millions in creating eye-popping ads, hoping to create catchy, unforgettable commercials. Unfortunately, most Super Bowl commercials end up being unmemorable. Costly mistakes for brands and creative flameouts for advertising firms. ~ Peter Diamandis

Don't waste money on advertising if you don't have a mobile website to back it up. ~ Anonymous

If men and women are at all times supposed to be a kind of walking CV, constantly networking, constantly advertising themselves, then this 'body' is the prime locus for any understanding of the way in which the logic of employment overcodes our very comportment. ~ Nina Power

Two common conceptions with regard to advertising which are held by a considerable number of people are that enormously large sums of money are expended for it, and that much of this expenditure is an economic waste. ~ Daniel Starch

I liked the sound of that. A true plant person. It sounded so much more alive, and warmer than a true advertising person. ~ Margot Berwin

A lot of medicines are not there to cure diseases. That's fine - drugs that keep people alive who wouldn't otherwise be alive are useful. What I object to is the drug companies' advertising, which you see everywhere in the U.S., which claims that they are curing diseases when they're not. ~ Richard J. Roberts

Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture. ~ Adrienne Monnier

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz. ~ Sigmar Polke

I figure...

...that the people are now more deeply conscious than ever before in history of the existence and functioning principles of universal, inexorable physical laws; of the pervading, quietly counseling truth within each and every one of us; of the power of love; and--each man by himself--of his own developing, dynamic relationship with his own conception of the Almightiness of the All-Knowing.

...that our contemporaries just don't wear their faith on their sleeves anymore.

...that people have removed faith from their sleeves because they found out for themselves that faith is much too important for careless display. Now they are willing to wait out the days and years for the truthful events, encouraged individually from within; and the more frequently the dramatic phrases advertising love, patriotism, fervent belief, morals, and good fellowship are plagiarized, appropriated and exhibited in the show windows of the world by the propaganda whips for indirect and ulterior motives, no matter how meager the compromise--the more do people withdraw within themselves and shun taking issue with the nauseating perversions, though eternally exhibiting quiet indifference, nonchalance or even cultivating seemingly ignorant acceptance. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Advertising was fairly simple work, and I really just wanted a job where I could sit and write every day and not get fired for it like I had at other jobs, but it was fun. ~ John Hughes

Isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all the advertising men who create it? ~ David Riesman

Taxpayers will not stand for - nor should they - the funding of poster sites, leaflets or advertising. What people will support is funding for political education, for training, for party organization. ~ Peter Hain

We need to know what the Bible teaches about right and wrong. Every day we are battered by messages - from the media, advertising, entertainment, celebrities, even our friends - with one underlying theme: Live for yourself. ~ Billy Graham

Rarely have I seen any really great advertising created without a certain amount of confusion, throw-aways, bent noses, irritation and downright cursedness. ~ Leo Burnett

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. ~ Bill Cosby

Advertising ought to work by telling you what it is you want to tell, you should understand what you want us to do, what you want us to think, where you want us to shop. ~ Jay Chiat

Arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth". By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs. ~ Bill Plotkin

It takes good clients to make a good advertising agency. Regardless of how much talent an ad agency may have, it is ineffective without good products and services to advertise. ~ Morris Hite

I grew up with free television. Now, it wasn't free, there was these commercials, and so the economic model was driven through commercials and through advertising. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

Word of mouth is more effective than traditional advertising for two key reasons. First, it's more persuasive. ~ Jonah Berger

An infinite advertising budget cannot counteract products that are disconnected from our biological heritage. ~ Gad Saad

I started billboard painting in Minneapolis, and I went to General Outdoor Advertising, and I said, 'I could do that.' They said, 'Oh yeah ... we can always use a good man around here.' ~ James Rosenquist

Everybody saw my successful advertising and thought I was a big success. But, behind those successes were several failures that I had to learn from before I made it. I've always looked at failure as just another step you need to take to reach success. ~ Joseph Sugarman

It should have been the Arabian Nights, but to Bond, seeing it first above the tops of trams and above the great scars of modern advertising along the river frontage, it seemed a once beautiful theatre-set that modern Turkey had thrown aside in favour of the steel and concrete flat-iron of the Istanbul-Hilton Hotel, blankly glittering behind him on the heights of Pera. ~ Ian Fleming

I've never worked in advertising - my experience was as an editorial designer for magazines - but you could say, in the bigger picture, that magazines are vehicles for colour advertising. ~ Barbara Kruger

You don't sell the product, you sell the philosophy. When you sell a product, you have customers, when you sell a philosophy, you have believers. ~ Soumeet Lanka

[T]he real lie that advertising tells is not so much in what it shows, but in what it leaves out. ~ Stefano Benni

If there is a main problem in American art today," says critic Tom Piazza, "it is not that we need the new to unshackle us from a suffocating and outmoded tradition. The new is constantly pumped out, by the ton and 24 hours a day, into the esthetic rivers, reservoirs and gullies of our culture, and nobody needs to go looking for it. With all the economic force of corporate profit and advertising behind it, pop culture, with its Billy the Kid ethos, has in fact become the new establishment. In a truly Orwellian irony, the new is the status quo."36 ~ James Bau Graves

This background enables us to understand a fact that is symptomatic of the current phase of saturation: there are countless people who want to withdraw from the omnipresence of advertising, who even avoid it like the plague. Here too, it is helpful to distinguish between the states before and after. From the perspective of the burgeoning world of products, advertising could be justified by the argument that spreading the word about the existence of new means of life improvements was indispensable, as the populations of industrial and trading nations would otherwise have been cheated of major knowledge about discreet improvements to the world. As the ambassador of new bringers of advantage, early advertising was the general training medium for contemporary performance collectives thoughtlessly denounced in culture-conservative milieus as 'consumer societies'. The aversion to advertising that pervades the saturated infospheres of the present, however, is based on the correct intuition that, in most of its manifestations, it has long since become a form of downward training. It no longer passes on what people should know in order to access advantageous innovations; it creates illusions of purchasable self-elevations that de facto usually lead to weakenings. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

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

Ninety-five percent of the time when I run a contest I've purchased the giveaway prizes with advertising money. ~ Ree Drummond

Brain-like in function and speed, the internet connected over one-third of the global population. Three million searches every minute; one-hundred-trillion emails every year; more Facebook users than people in North America, all with with personal photos, videos, apps, and chats. There were dozens of dating sites, an immersive universe called 2nd Life that boasted a country-sized GDP, a slew of viruses, obnoxious advertising, more than a billion photos of naked women, and seventy-two hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. This was the environment where the friendship flourished. ~ Jake Vander Ark

It's almost as if creativity is dead. The visual power of advertising was everywhere - now it's basically gone. ~ George Lois

Think there's a culture of Silicon Valley that seems to have the attitude that you can have it both ways, that you can be an insurgent but also, ultimately, it's paid for by advertising, when in fact advertising is totally retrograde. Now that's an industry we should be disrupting, and maybe you disrupt it by funding public media. None of this is technological destiny; there are only social choices. ~ Astra Taylor

Manufacturers these days have peculiar problems: a package may recommend the virtues of its product by voice only, for it is not allowed to grab the customer by the sleeve or collar. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are really part of a very big advertising program, and the fact that they make so much money is because the markets have dictated that they get that money, and the fact that they endorse our products allows us to sell more products and create more jobs. ~ Phil Knight

Girls get the message from very early on that what's most important is how they look, that their value, their worth depends on that. And boys get the message that this is what's important about girls. We get it from advertising. We get it from films. We get it from television shows, video games, everywhere we look. So no matter what else a woman does, no matter what else her achievements, their value still depends on how they look. ~ Jean Kilbourne

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

The Great Idea in advertising is far more than the sum of the recognition scores, the ratings and all the other superficial indicators of its success; it is in the realm of myth, to which measurements cannot apply. ~ Leo Bogart

In 1938, I. G. Farben sent a letter to (a major drug firm), one of its American subsidiaries, (that)..all advertising contracts must contain ' ... a legal clause whereby the contract is immediately cancelled if overnight the attitude of the paper toward Germany should be changed. ~ G. Edward Griffin

Thirty-one days later, in the summer of 1981, he became a full-time writer, and the feeling of liberation as he left the agency for the last time was heady and exhilarating. He shed advertising like an unwanted skin, though he continued to take a sneaky pride in his bestknown slogan, "Naughty but nice" (created for the Fresh Cream Cake Client), and in his "bubble words" campaign for Aero chocolate (IRRESISTIBUBBLE, DELECTABUBBLE, ADORABUBBLE, the billboards cried, and bus sides read TRANSPORTABUBBLE, trade advertising said PROFITABUBBLE, and storefront decals proclaimed AVAILABUBBLE HERE). Later that year, when Midnight's Children was awarded the Booker Prize, the first telegram he received - there were these communications called "telegrams" in those days - was from his formerly puzzled boss. "Congratulations," it read. "One of us made it. ~ Salman Rushdie

Back in the early 1970's the average person experienced roughly 500 advertising messages a day. By the 1990's that number had jumped to 5,000 and today (2014) the number of advertising messages we see on a daily basis is close to 13,000. ~ Rob Anspach

Brands that will survive and thrive from now on are those with C-level executives that understand the incredible opportunity new media offers them and commit to excellence in managing their social media presence. ~ Brian E. Boyd Sr.

There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make 30 cents a unit when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus, the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin. ~ John D. MacDonald

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

In advertising, sex sells. But only if you're selling sex. ~ Jef I. Richards

It is not unprofessional to give free legal advice, but advertising that the first visit will be free is a bit like a fox telling chickens he will not bite them until they cross the threshold of the hen house. ~ Warren E. Burger

Advertising prods people into wanting more and better things. Of course advertising makes people dissatisfied with what they have - makes them raise their sights. Mighty good thing it does. Nothing could be worse for the United States than 200,000,000 satisfied Americans. ~ Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility. [An anarchist] ~ Joseph Conrad

Advertising is the life of trade. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their marks
Made everything from toy guns that sparks
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the President of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright, Ma, I can make it.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despite their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platforms ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God Bl ~ Bob Dylan

Advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it. ~ Freya Stark

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy. ~ Christopher Lasch

They're still advertising the added health-giving advantages of vitamins in your daily diet, although it has long since been shown that you'd be better off eating Smarties. ~ Terry Wogan

When you think of a brand, you should immediately understand it from the advertising attitude, from the words and visuals. ~ George Lois

For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate. ~ Peter Thiel

Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. ~ Edward Bernays

Plan the sale when you plan the ad. ~ Leo Burnett

The advertising men made it clear that there were two ways of looking at ideas in a war against fascism. Those of us who were working on the project believed ideas were to be fought for; the advertising men believed they were to be sold. The audience, those at home in wartime, were not 'citizens' or 'people.' They were 'customers.' ~ Muriel Rukeyser

Production goes up and up because high pressure advertising and salesmanship constantly create new needs that must be satisfied: this is Admass- a consumer's race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot. ~ J.B. Priestley

Creativity is an advertising agency's most valuable asset, because it is the rarest. ~ Jef I. Richards

As our initial click fraud research study showed last year, there is an obvious problem in the online advertising world. The challenge is that I'm not sure anyone really knows the extent of the click fraud problem. ~ Flint McGlaughlin

All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for. ~ Pauline Kael

The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images ... and they were very expensive. ~ Jon Oringer

You can have good or you can have cheap, but you cannot have both. ~ Simone Puorto

The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination ~ Claude C. Hopkins

Sales may lead to advertising as much as advertising leads to sales. ~ Michael Schudson

I'd say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company (we're the biggest share-holder). They want to be associated with every wonderful image: heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don't want to be associated with presidents' funerals and so-forth. ~ Charlie Munger

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence
but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson
that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them. ~ Naomi Wolf

Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped. ~ David Ogilvy

A businessman who stops advertising to save money is like a foolish who stops a clock to save time. ~ Moosa Rahat

As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world. The first four words ever uttered, Let there be light, constitute its charter. All nature is vibrant with its impulse. ~ Bruce Barton

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

I once found myself conspiring with a British Cabinet Minister as to how we might persuade Her Majesty's Treasury to cough up more money for the British Travel advertising in America. Said he, "Why does any American in his senses spend his vacation in the cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under Italian skies? I can only suppose that your advertising is the answer." Damn right. ~ David Ogilvy

Advertising enjoins everyone to consume, while the economy prohibits the vast majority of humanity from doing so. The command that everyone do what so many cannot becomes an invitation to crime. ~ Eduardo Galeano

I have made it a rule for a long time, not to part with the copyright of my drawings, for I have been so copied, my drawings reproduced and sold for advertisements and done in ways I hate. ~ Kate Greenaway

The new breed of reporter doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't have sex beyond reproducing, and most importantly - doesn't believe. They don't believe they are there to question everything. They are there to print whatever is told to them. The news is dead, my friend. Buried under a mountain of full color advertising, and six-digit deposit slips. ~ Greg Crites

Two powerful, opposing forces - one seducing people to eat and the other telling them they are failures if they do - create heartache everywhere. ~ Emme

I came from advertising. For me it's about protecting the director's vision. That's always the goal. There's keeping things on budget and on time and dealing with selling the movie so that to me is a focus. But also it's about serving the script. We are genre filmmakers, those are the films we love to make, so my perspective is a little different. ~ Charles Roven

Persuasion is not a science but an art ~ William Bernbach

I think there is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle and the notion of building your happiness from the outside-in by acquiring things ... which if you think about it, is the essence of advertising ~ Edward Norton

I was delighted to have lines when they came - learning lines for film isn't a problem, but television is a little different, because we shot those shows the whole way through. ~ David Selby

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

About as much business as a cat owner has selling dog food. Or an Olympic swimmer has advertising for downhill ski equipment. Or a nun writing hard core erotica.
Abso-fucking-none. ~ Laurel Ulen Curtis

Yes!" she said raising her arms in the air. "Finally! I get to meet the invisible man!"
"He's not invisible," I said sitting on the edge of her desk.
"Oh please," she said. "I've never seen him. Except maybe in a magazine advertising crazy people, or maybe it was rich people? I get the two mixed up."

Lyndi and Sloane ~ Micalea Smeltzer

Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn't offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion. ~ Edward Snowden

No amount of advertising can repair the damage done by failing to properly address a customer's concern. ~ Albert Houtum-Schindler

We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that's bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon's one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does. ~ Brad Stone

There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons. ~ Stephanie Mills

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease. ~ George Orwell