Advertising Quotes

“Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don`t need, with money they don`t have, in order to impress others who don`t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today.”
― Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change

“Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed justice, of hatred passed off as righteousness and honor called dishonorable, all jammed in around advertisements in which a gecko sells insurance, a bear sells toilet tissue, a dog sells cars, a gorilla sells investment advisers, a tiger sells cereal, and an elephant sells a drug that will improve your lung capacity, as if no human being in America any longer believes any other human being, but trusts only the recommendations of animals.”
― Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd

“Spam is a waste of the receivers’ time, and, a waste of the sender’s optimism.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit

“Advertising is to a genuine article what manure is to land, - it largely increases the product.”
― P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World

“It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem

“Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.”
― Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book

“Social media takes time and careful, strategic thought. It doesn’t happen by accident.”
― Brian E Boyd, Social Media for the Executive: Maximize Your Brand and Monetize Your Business

“Literacy makes man a victim of advertising. Education makes him a victim of employment.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Eat pudding. Books are good. Eat pudding. If kids read a lot. Eat pudding. They'll get so they can think clearly. Eat pudding. And if enough kids read and think. Eat pudding. We will have world peace. Eat pudding. Thank you very much. Eat pudding.”
― Daniel Pinkwater, Fish Whistle: Little Short Essays by Daniel Pinkwater

“Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission.”
― Fred Allen

“This background enables us to understand a fact that is symptomatic of the current phase of saturation: there are countless people who want to withdraw from the omnipresence of advertising, who even avoid it like the plague. Here too, it is helpful to distinguish between the states before and after. From the perspective of the burgeoning world of products, advertising could be justified by the argument that spreading the word about the existence of new means of life improvements was indispensable, as the populations of industrial and trading nations would otherwise have been cheated of major knowledge about discreet improvements to the world. As the ambassador of new bringers of advantage, early advertising was the general training medium for contemporary performance collectives thoughtlessly denounced in culture-conservative milieus as 'consumer societies'. The aversion to advertising that pervades the saturated infospheres of the present, however, is based on the correct intuition that, in most of its manifestations, it has long since become a form of downward training. It no longer passes on what people should know in order to access advantageous innovations; it creates illusions of purchasable self-elevations that de facto usually lead to weakenings.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern

“For your business to stand out and succeed, you have to put a primary focus on the social media space, go in big (halfway will not do), and do it better than most, right from the start.”
― Brian E Boyd, Social Media for the Executive: Maximize Your Brand and Monetize Your Business

“To see what they look like, women look at a mirror. To look like what they see, women read magazines.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A newspaper is an oversized book with adverts and an expiry date.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.”
― Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads

“Occasionally the poster pictures a pair of cyclists; and then one grasps the fact how much superior for purposes of flirtation is the modern bicycle to the old-fashioned parlour or the played-out garden gate. He and she mount their bicycles, being careful, of course, that such are of the right make. After that they have nothing to think about but the old sweet tale. Down shady lanes, through busy towns on market days, merrily roll the wheels of the “Bermondsey Company’s Bottom Bracket Britain’s Best,” or of the “Camberwell Company’s Jointless Eureka.” They need no pedalling; they require no guiding. Give them their heads, and tell them what time you want to get home, and that is all they ask. While Edwin leans from his saddle to whisper the dear old nothings in Angelina’s ear, while Angelina’s face, to hide its blushes, is turned towards the horizon at the back, the magic bicycles pursue their even course.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel

“Advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it
implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and
getting the joke, respectively).”
― David Foster Wallace

“Social media is your opportunity to reach a massive number of people with transparency, honesty, and integrity.”
― Brian E Boyd, Social Media for the Executive: Maximize Your Brand and Monetize Your Business

“Between Monday and Saturday men make an audience. On Sunday, they make a congregation.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Prostitutes are paid for taking their clothes off. Celebrities are paid for putting others' clothes on.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A celebrity's body is an advertiser's canvas.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“...Her boyfriend gives her a Mercedes, [her friends] say, 'Oh, that's nice.' But her boyfriend gives her a diamond, they say, 'Oh, he's serious.' It's not just the gift of love-it's the gift of commitment. She's not jumping up and down because she got a diamond ring but because she got a guy! There are those who say you don't need diamonds. I say they're right. Just like you don't need sex.”
― Tom Zoellner, The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire

“I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility. [An anarchist]”
― Joseph Conrad, A Set of Six

“Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do…”
― George Lois

“Brands that will survive and thrive from now on are those with C-level executives that understand the incredible opportunity new media offers them and commit to excellence in managing their social media presence.”
― Brian E Boyd, Social Media for the Executive: Maximize Your Brand and Monetize Your Business

“For an entrepreneur: wealth invites fame. For a celebrity: fame invites wealth.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“By doing extraordinary things you are contributing to create a better world. Memorable should be the new usual…”
― Juanmarketing

“I should go into advertising or public relations because if there is someone or something I like, I will promote it like it’s the cure for whatever ailment is in your life. If I love you, I want you to love what I love. Consider yourself smitten or else, suffer hearing me talk about it nonstop…until you also love it.”
― Katie Kiesler, 22 and Single

“I have always understood that money made in the patent medicine business is a practical bar to social success.”
― George Presbury Rowell, Forty years an advertising agent, 1865-1905

“If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism--the single greatest source of its waning morality--I should without hesitation name advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose--say the exaltation of the public sector--it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions.”
― Robert L. Hellbroner