Advertising Quotes

“Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Capitalism, far from affording "privileges" to the middle classes, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own oppression—first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus. Tyrannized as he is by every vicissitude of bourgeois society, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrates with insecurity. His soporifics—commodities and more commodities—are his very poison. In this sense there is nothing more oppressive than "privilege" today, for the deepest recesses of the "privileged" man's psyche are fair game for exploitation and domination.”
― Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

“Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Never," enjoins a women's magazine, "mention the size of his [penis] in public...and never, ever let him know that anyone else knows or you may find it shrivels up and disappears, serving you right." That quotation acknowledges that critical sexual comparison is a direct anaphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or we understand on some level that right now that effect is desirable and appropriate.

A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“In spite of hopes to the contrary, pornography and mass culture are working to collapse sexuality with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way sex it. This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they are behaving within socially accepted norms.”
― Susan G. Cole

“The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.”
― George Monbiot

“If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.”
― Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

“Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth's climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let's undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a "grassroots" group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the days of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch the infotoxins spread - and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come.”
― Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge - and Why We Must

“Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines.

The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.”
― John Berger

“The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.”
― John Berger

“As the wall between advertising and content erodes, the aptitude required to understand the functions and design of media content becomes more complex.”
― Matthew P. McAllister

“The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.”
― Naomi Wolf

“...you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don’t flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“[I]m Internet [ist] Aufmerksamkeit eine echte Ware geworden, die sich bereits im Moment ihrer Entstehung vermarkten lässt.”
― Sascha Lobo, Wir nennen es Arbeit

“Големите компании виждат нещата такива, кавито са. Предприемачите ги виждат такива, каквито могат да бъдат.”
― Al Ries, The Origin of Brands: How Product Evolution Creates Endless Possibilities for New Brands

“Bredon shuddered.
“I think this is an awfully immoral job of ours. I do, really. Think how we spoil the digestions of the public.”
“Ah, yes—but think how earnestly we strive to put them right again. We undermine ’em with one hand and build ’em with the other. The vitamins we destroy in the canning, we restore in Revito, the roughage we remove from Peabody’s Piper Parritch we make up into a package and market as Bunbury’s Breakfast Bran; the stomachs we ruin with Pompayne, we re-line with Peplets to aid digestion. And by forcing the damn-fool public to pay twice over—once to have its food emasculated and once to have the vitality put back again, we keep the wheels of commerce turning and give employment to thousands—including you and me.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise

“Trade shows and events drive a surge in readership for trade magazines, websites, and newspapers. This spike is a prime opportunity to expose your company to thousands of potential buyers.”
― Lisa Masiello, Trade Show 411: The Essential Guide to Exhibiting Like a Pro

“Modern culture rewards the loud, the fast, and the visible. It mistrusts the silent, the slow, and the mysterious. What cannot be monetized is rendered irrelevant, and what cannot be digitized is deemed nonexistent. And so, truth becomes noise, authenticity becomes brand, and pain becomes content.”
― Sov8840

“What society teaches people is not to guard themselves like precious gold that must not be stolen, but rather to make them forget that they themselves are valuable gold—encouraging them to scatter this gem within outwardly. If one pays attention to those who have internalized and ritualized the selling of their soul, it becomes clear: they possess dozens of interests and pursuits, paint colorful pictures, and write rich texts, yet remain inwardly colorless and utterly empty.”
― Sov8840

“Every kind of passion is being transformed into a form of industry. Every passion is monetized or at least expected to be. This can be observed in schools, shows, articles, conferences, films, advertisements, and even within the primitive instincts of humans: the relentless conversion of passion into profession, the monetization of personal emotions and thoughts. This message is constantly propagated, taught, and encouraged by all of these forces. More than that, it is what people dream of—because they all embody identities scripted by singular capitalist narratives. And this constitutes the greatest insult to one’s inner world.”
― Sov8840

“Campaigns don’t begin with cameras or creatives—they begin with chaos. The rest is just learning how to dance in it.”
― Ranjan Bhattacharya, Behind the Campaign: A Photographer’s View of Branding, Clients, and Chaos

“He learned from advertising that poor people were fiercely brand conscious. They wasted their money on advertised products because they were deathly afraid of wasting their money.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“If it's not broken, break it for views!”
― Unknown Author

“Advertising is, at its core, a package of well-crafted lies designed to make you believe you want or need something, and to make that something look more attractive than it really is. It's about control: controlling a message, controlling an image, and controlling desires.”
― Eric San Juan, Celebrating Mad Men: Your Unofficial Guide to What Makes the Show and Its Characters Tick

“And, like so much of capitalist innovation, the glitches and good-enough fixes that adtech promoters assure us are temporary— certain to disappear as technologies realize their full potential— turn out to be enduring features of a future-in-the-making that never arrives at its promised destination.”
― Lee McGuigan, Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech