quotations about advertising
Advertising is the best insurance that you can take out on your business. You can buy fire insurance on your stock of goods, but no company will issue a policy covering your business, the good will as they sometimes call it. You must insure yourself, and the best way to do it is by advertising. Good advertising kept up for a number of years gives you something that no fire can take away.
FRANK FARRINGTON
The Spatula, May, 1909
Advertising is immodesty turned to profit.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Advertising is tactical; branding is strategic. The most strategic action you will usually get from an advertising agency will be the brief, the planning document that spells out the proposition the advertising must communicate and defines the market segments it should address. But then what? And what about internally? How will you get your personnel on brand? Is the advertising supposed to convince them as well? How is a glossy television or poster campaign supposed to communicate to your delivery driver and sales assistant the vital roles they each need to play in making sure your company lives up to its promises?
MARCUS OSBORNE
Stop Advertising Start Branding
The art of advertisement ... has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Promise as an Institution", The Doom of Youth
I gave someone a perverse argument not so long ago about why advertising is better than movies. You want to hear it? Movies operate from a really disingenuous premise, that people are heroes. I know a lot of people and have had an opportunity over the years to observe them. Are they heroes...? Let's put it this way. Advertising tries something simpler and more believable: Products as heroes. I guess the idea is: When all else fails, put your faith in conditioner.
ERROL MORRIS
Boards Magazine, Aug. 1, 2000
Many nations of consumers talk and live like ads. Advertising is not just a mirror but also a perceptioncreator. It makes and moulds generations of attitudes.
HARISH BIJOOR
"In Indian advertising, diversity is reduced to cultural stereotypes", Economic Times, February 17, 2016
As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world.
BRUCE BARTON
The Man Nobody Knows
Advertising is of the very essence of democracy. An election goes on every minute of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which manufacturer and which product shall be the leader today, and which shall lead tomorrow.
BRUCE BARTON
attributed, Advertising in America
There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.
CARL SAGAN
Contact
Advertising is not a rifle; it is a shotgun, and any campaign featuring outdoor boards of a cartoon animal inevitably will catch children in its spray.
BOB GARFIELD
attributed, Deadly Persuasion
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
TED TURNER
Call Me Ted
Good advertising is advertising that gets the money.
JULIUS SCHNEIDER
attributed, The Advertising Age
Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for millions. Advertising is the Archimedean lever that is moving the world. If things were done in another and elder age that advertising is doing now, a whole mythology would gather about it, and we should witness the birth of a young God--powerful, restless, indomitable and wise, dominating. He would flash in the sylvan glades of the want advertisements and disport himself in the sunny whiteness of the department stores' wide spaces. But what a god he would be! How beneficent, how omnipresent, how powerful!
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
attributed, New York Magazine, Jun. 10, 1968
Advertising is no longer preoccupied with the staging of the commodity. Instead advertising is the prefiguration of the commodity's empty form.
PAMELA ODIH
Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times
What we used to call advertising is evolving into something far more personal and ubiquitous. You may not like it, but you'd better be ready for it.
CHUCK PORTER
attributed, Beyond Advertising: Creating Value Through All Customer Touchpoints
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
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
The Perfect Salesman
Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Understanding Media
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
Advertising is salesmanship-in-print.
CLAUDE C. HOPKINS
My Life in Advertising