quotations about advertising
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 not a rifle; it is a shotgun, and any campaign featuring outdoor boards of a cartoon animal inevitably will catch children in its spray.
BOB GARFIELD
attributed, Deadly Persuasion
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
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
The art of advertisement ... has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Promise as an Institution", The Doom of Youth
Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.
PAUL GRAHAM
"How to Start a Startup"
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
GEORGE ORWELL
Why I Write
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
We read advertisements to discover and enlarge our desires.
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
attributed, X-Rated: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture
The ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort to sell something by yelling in print.
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
Average Jones
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
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
Brands and advertisers today are begging for a better experience when it comes to engaging consumers. On a constant mission for better relevancy and less intrusiveness, advertisers are increasingly raising questions about the transparency of decisions and the costs involved across the entire ecosystem. This is where hype turns into reality.
ANTTI PASILA
"Taking a fresh look at digital advertising", iMedia, February 28, 2016
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
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
One of the hottest areas of advertising growth involves the Internet. The interactive nature of Internet marketing offers unique marketing advantages that conventional electronic media, such as radio and television, cannot replicate. Interactive advertising affords the marketer the ability to engage the consumer in a direct and personal way. Another major advantage of online advertising is the content is not limited by geography or time. In addition, the results for advertisement campaigns may be monitored in real-time. Essentially all of the leading 100 national advertisers in the United States have begun advertising on the web.
MICHAEL A. MCGREGOR
Head's Broadcasting in America: A Survey of Electronic Media
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
Advertising is the way great brands get to be great brands.
AL RIES & LAURA RIES
The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR