Advertising Quotes

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 principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope. We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.

Aldous Huxley

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

Norman Douglas

What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.

David Ogilvy

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

George Orwell

Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams -- Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.

E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White

Advertising is the principal reason why the business person has come to inherit the earth.

James R. Adams

The trouble with America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

Louis Kronenberger

Telling lies does not work in advertising.

Tim Bell

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

Dorothy L. Sayers

The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements

Thomas Jefferson

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

Sinclair Lewis

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

Mark Twain

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

Samuel Johnson

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

Samuel Johnson

One ad is worth more to a paper than forty editorials.

Will Rogers

That's the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts.

Samuel Goldwyn

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

John Lahr

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

Raymond Chandler

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

George Santayana