Advertising Quotes

498 Sourced quotes

In the world of commercial speech, tobacco advertising bears the earmarks of an endangered species.

Jef I. Richards

Bangladesh is heavily invested in advertising itself to Americans and other potential trading partners as a "moderate Muslim country."... Over the last few decades, however, they have come more and more under the thumb of radical jihadis. Yet, they have not stopped trying to portray themselves as what they perhaps were at one point, and few Americans know that the reality is not what they are saying it is.

I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

Hollywood has its Oscars. Television has its Emmys. Broadway has its Tonys. And advertising has its Clios. And its Andys, Addys, Effies and Obies. And 117 other assorted awards. And those are just the big ones.

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Booker T. Washington

In essence, the motivation of the attacks on advertising is hostility toward capitalism and egoism.

Jerry Kirkpatrick

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Marshall McLuhan

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics—not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social mass-action rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works.

Robert A. Heinlein

The microphone-amplifier-loudspeaker combination is having an enormous effect on our civilization. Not all of it is good! Consider to what heights of impudence and tyranny, and to what depths of moral depravity, has radio broadcasting and the loudspeaker attained in that recent monstrosity, Transit Radio, Inc. Almost incredible is the loathsome fact that already in 21 cities bus riders must listen to never-ending, blatant advertising and unwelcome jitterbug and bop music.

Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.

I think central to good writing of advertising, or anything else, is a person who has developed an understanding of people, an insight into them, a sympathy toward them. I think that that develops more sharply when the writer has not had an easy adjustment to living. So that they have themselves felt the need for understanding, the need for sympathy, and can therefore see that need in other people.

Let's say you have $1,000,000 tied up in your little company and suddenly your advertising isn't working and sales are going down. And everything depends on it. Your future depends on it, your family's future depends on it, other people's families depend on it... Now, what do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?

The Yuppies are not defectors from revolt, they are a new race, assured, amnestied, exculpated, moving with ease in the world of performance, mentally indifferent to any objective other than that of change and advertising.

Jean Baudrillard

Though some still see the Internet, for example, as a democratic structure for international individual expression, it is more realistic to recognize it as only the latest technological vehicle to be turned, sooner or later, to corporate advantage - for advertising, marketing and general corporate aggrandizement.

Herbert Schiller

Advertising didn't mix sex up with our daily lives. The great Marketeer in the sky did that.

There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs.

In the absence of traditional authority, advertising has become a kind of social guide. It depicts us in all the myriad situations possible to a life of free choice. It provides ideas about style, morality, behavior.

Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.

There is no way for the American economic system to function without advertising. There is no other way to communicate enough information about enough products to enough people with enough speed.

Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

Human beings today … are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City [London's Wall Street], the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that.

History will see advertising "as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that."

Malcolm Muggeridge

Marriage is a good deal like a circus: there is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising.