quotations about advertising
It has been said, no doubt in good faith and certainly with some reason, that advertising as currently carried on gives the body of consumers valuable information and guidance as to the ways and means whereby their wants can be satisfied and their purchasing power can be best utilized. To the extent to which this holds true, advertising is a service to the community. But there is a large reservation to be made on this head. Advertising is competitive; the greater part of it aims to divert purchases ... from one channel to another channel of the same general class. And to the extent to which the efforts of advertising in all its branches are spent on this competitive disturbance of trade, they are, on the whole, of slight if any immediate service to the community.
THORSTEIN VEBLEN
The Theory of Business Enterprise
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 fundamentally broken -- the Internet screwed it up and the only rational response is for people to use ad-blockers and tune out all the crappy ads.
JOE MARCHESE
"Fox Advertising Executive Joe Marchese Says Digital Media Is Unfairly Screwing Cable", re/code, February 18, 2016
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 a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to his daughter, Aug. 24, 1940
Advertising is utterly unprofitable, and I could prove it to you in one week. End an ad with an offer to pay five dollars to anyone who writes you that he read the ad through. The scarcity of replies will amaze you.
CLAUDE C. HOPKINS
Scientific Advertising
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
Advertising is like oxygen, you can't survive without it.
DONALD E. HULTS
Unseen Untold is Unsold
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
Why do Jell-O and Coke pay Bill Cosby to sell their products? Why do politicians wrap themselves in the flag? Why is Miller brewed the American way? Why do we love baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet? Why? Because these people and symbols are already powerful anchors in the culture, and the advertisers are simply transferring the feeling we have for these people or symbols to their products. They use them as ways to make us receptive to whatever it is they're selling.
ANTHONY ROBBINS
Unlimited Power: A Black Choice
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
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
According to the estimate of a prominent advertising firm, above 90 per cent, of the earning capacity of the prominent nostrums is represented by their advertising. And all this advertising is based on the well-proven theory of the public's pitiable ignorance and gullibility in the vitally important matter of health.
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
"The Fundamental Fakes", Collier's Weekly, Feb. 17, 1906
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
FRANZ KAFKA
attributed, The Daily Book of Positive Quotations
We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
ZELDA FITZGERALD
Save Me the Waltz
The base of advertising is the mob movement ... to make a mass of people move in a certain direction.
THOMAS E. DOCKRELL
Annual Convention of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Advertising is the garment of abundance ... a Masque-like "put on" of all the motifs and actions of our time.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Culture Is Our Business
Advertising is everywhere. Most of us do our best to ignore, or even block it. However, there are always some campaigns that manage to penetrate through our ambivalence and make us stop and listen.
WILL HEILPERN
"Inside the world's 8 best advertising campaigns of 2015", Business Insider, February 13, 2016
Good, careful advertising of the steady, never-let-up sort will positively win. It isn't the fisherman who goes thrashing along and fishes the whole length of a stream in an afternoon that gets the fish. It's the quiet chap who finds a likely looking hole and camps out right by it until he gets his fish and then tries another in the same careful way. More than that, this careful fisherman does not get discouraged because Mr. Fish fails to snap up the hook at the first cast. He tries the bait and he tries the flies, and he changes his lure and his point of view until he hits it right. If the business doesn't respond to the advertising, change the advertising. Don't lay it up to the public that your bait doesn't tempt them.
FRANK FARRINGTON
The Spatula, May, 1909