Michael Schudson - Advertising Quotes

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Most criticism of advertising is written in ignorance of what actually happens inside these agencies.

Michael Schudson
The schools, government, and news media are all more powerful in shaping people's basic concepts of how the world operates and what kinds of lives are worth living. Still, advertising is a powerful cultural institution in this country (less so in other capitalist countries, though its presence is growing).

Michael Schudson
Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to initiate them.

Michael Schudson
The effectiveness of advertising depends on the amount and kind of product information available to consumers.... advertising will be more successful the more impoverished the consumer's information environment.

Michael Schudson
Sales may lead to advertising as much as advertising leads to sales.

Michael Schudson
Advertising is much less powerful than advertisers and critics of advertising claim, and advertising agencies are stabbing in the dark much more than they are practicing precision microsurgery on the public consciousness.

Michael Schudson
American advertisers rely on 'essentially illogical' approaches to determine their advertising budgets.

Michael Schudson
Different groups are differentially vulnerable to advertising; and their vulnerability varies not so much with the character or quantity of advertisements as with the informational resources they can claim by age, education, station in life, and government guarantees of consumer protection.

Michael Schudson
If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art.

Michael Schudson
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, whether or not it sells cars or chocolate, surrounds us and enters into us, so that when we speak we may speak in or with reference to the language of advertising and when we see we may see through schemata that advertising has made salient for us.... [S]trictly as symbol, the power of advertising may be considerable.

Michael Schudson
Advertising may make people believe they are inadequate without Product X and that Product X will satisfactorily manage their inadequacies. More likely, it may remind them of inadequacies they have already felt and may lead them, once at least, to try a new product that just might help, even though they are well aware that it probably will not.

Michael Schudson
The advertising agencies and the media can argue the point either way. If they are trying to convince an advertiser to increase the media budget, they can cite examples of devastatingly successful advertising campaigns. But if they are defending themselves before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or a civic organization decrying television advertising to children, they trot out the data that demonstrate that advertising has slight or no effect on product sales.

Michael Schudson
It is entirely plausible... that advertising helps sell goods even if it never persuades a consumer of anything. So long as investers, salespeople, and retailers believe advertising affects consumers, advertising will influence product availability and this, by itself, shapes consumer choice. Availability, as marketers sometimes say, equals sales. Advertising may be an important signal system within the business world." "Despite efforts at 'psychographics' which, here and there, have proved useful guides for advertising, the most consistently used and efficient criteria for describing consumers are the most psychologically blunt — demographics.... It is the most consistently employed kind of data in advertising work.

Michael Schudson
It is very likely that many firms spend more on advertising than, for their own best interests, they should.

Michael Schudson