Advertising Quotes

498 Sourced quotes

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.

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

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.

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

Jef I. Richards

The advertising agency, as it stands today, is a peculiar manifestation of American business life of the twentieth century — glossy, brash, and insecure.

It pleased Oolb Votz on this occasion to recommend himself to The God in His Aspect of Kaphoom the Sly, Patron of Confidence Men, Charlatans, Swindlers, Phonies, Advertising Executive, and All Priests.

Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it.

If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the popular culture that advertisements are silly.

Michael Schudson

Advertising departments, as you know, are crawling with people whose frontal lobes are so under developed that if you flatter them a bit they'll swear shit is platinum!

Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life.

Augusten Burroughs

In American business today, with so many good companies offering bewilderingly similar products, advertising has become perhaps the critical factor in the consumer's decision of which one of those products to buy. The environment is not so much one of innovation as it is one of marketing - which means the adman, more than ever, has become its superstar.

Skip Hollandsworth

Advertising is on its deathbed and it will not survive long, having contracted a fatal case of new technology.

The reason I've been calling what we do media arts for the last five years is because I would like the definition to change and the respectability to come back to big advertising networks. We have to claw our way back to respectability.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

Daniel J. Boorstin

During the 36 years I have been in the agency business I have always been naively guided by the principle that if we do not believe in the products we advertise strongly enough to use them ourselves, or at least to give them a real try, we are not completely honest with ourselves in advertising them to others....

Eliminate all forms of monopolistic market power, to include the breakup of large oligopolistic corporations and application of anti-trust laws to labor unions. A Federal incorporation law could be used to limit corporation size and where technology required giant firms for reasons of low cost production the Federal government should own and operate them... Promote economic stability by reform of the monetary system and establishment of stable rules for monetary policy... Reform the tax system and promote equity through income tax... Abolish all tariffs... Limit waste by restricting advertising and other wasteful merchandising practices.

Henry Calvert Simons

Advertising is legalized lying.

When a client comes to us with a product, he is, in effect, giving us a problem to be solved.... Some of the biggest advertising mistakes are people who imagine they know what the problem is, or they're not even thinking about; they're just coming up with that brilliant idea and trying to force the problem to fit it.

Mary Wells Lawrence

The work of an advertising agency is warmly and immediately human. It deals with human needs, wants, dreams and hopes. Its 'product' cannot be turned out on an assembly line.

The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising.

All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester—but without hangovers.

Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

I was in California and I was talking to, I think, fifth graders, and one little girl raised her hand and said, 'Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?' And I said, 'Well, you just say no.' And there it was born. I think people thought that we had an advertising agency over who dreamed that up — not true.

It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.

No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law?