quotations about advertising
The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.
TOM ROBBINS
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
The Perfect Salesman
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
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
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 consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife.
DAVID OGILVY
Confessions of an Advertising Man
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
attributed, Subliminal Seduction
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to his daughter, Aug. 24, 1940
The ubiquity of advertising is, of course, just another effect of our uninhibited efforts to use all the media to get all sorts of information to everybody everywhere. Since the places to be filled are everywhere, the amount of advertising is not determined by the needs of advertising, but by the opportunities for advertising, which become unlimited.
DANIEL BOORSTIN
attributed, Media/Impact: An Introduction to Mass Media