quotations about advertising
The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.
TOM ROBBINS
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
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
When advertising is great advertising, it fastens on the myths, signs, and symbols of our common experience and becomes, quite literally, a benefit of the product.... As a result of great advertising, food tastes better, clothes feel snugger, cars ride smoother. The stuff of semiotics becomes the magic of advertising.
CURT SUPLEE
attributed, Persuasion: Reception and Responsibility
We read advertisements to discover and enlarge our desires.
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
attributed, X-Rated: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture
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
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
Much brass has been sounded and many cymbals tinkled in the name of advertising; but the advertisements which persuade people to act are written by men who have an abiding respect for the intelligence of their readers, and a deep sincerity regarding the merits of the goods they have to sell.
BRUCE FAIRCHILD BARTON
The Man Nobody Knows
The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife.
DAVID OGILVY
Confessions of an Advertising Man
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
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
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
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 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
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
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
attributed, Subliminal Seduction
The future of video advertising is not about a one-way shift to digital video, it's a holistic approach to all screens. The lines between TV and video are all but indistinguishable to consumers, and the most successful advertising will take that same approach.
SCOTT FERBER
"Media Buyers are Bullish about Linear TV Advertising", World Screen, March 4, 2016
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
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