quotations about advertising
The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.
TOM ROBBINS
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife.
DAVID OGILVY
Confessions of an Advertising Man
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
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
The Perfect Salesman
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
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 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 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 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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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