58 Advertising Quotes

A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.

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.

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising.

Joe Louis and I were the first modern national sports figures who were black... But neither of us could do national advertising because the South wouldn't buy it. That was the social stigma we lived under.

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.

The ad in the paper said 'Big Sale. Last Week.' Why advertise? I already missed it. They're just rubbing it in.

'Viewers have a way of remembering the celebrity while forgetting the product. I did not know this when I paid Eleanor Roosevelt $35,000 to make a commercial for margarine. She reported that her mail was equally divided. 'One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation.' Not one of my proudest memories.'

'Never Write an Advertisement Which You Wouldn't Want Your Own Family To Read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by.'

'Once upon a time I was riding on the top of a First Avenue bus, when I heard a mythical housewife say to another, 'Molly, my dear, I would have bought that new brand of toilet soap if only they hadn't set the body copy in ten point Garamond.' Don't you believe it. What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.'

'H. L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. That is not true. I have come to believe that it pays to make all your layouts project a feeling of good taste, provided that you do it unobtrusively. An ugly layout suggests an ugly product. There are very few products which do not benefit from being given a first class ticket through life.'

Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.

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

'It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement, and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and read. Therefore, study the graphics used by editors and imitate them. Study the graphics used in advertisements, and avoid them.'

And now, in the interest of equal time, here is a message from the National Pancake Institute, and it says 'Fuck waffles'.

They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

Commercials were too phony for me. I just didn't like selling a product I didn't believe in.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

It's gonna be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere, especially in women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way, or else you're worthless. You know, when you look in the mirror and think, 'Ugh, I'm so ugly, I'm so fat, I'm so old.' Don't you know that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising. Magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself, so you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around creme that doesn't turn around shit.

Beer commercials usually have big men, manly men doing manly things: 'You just killed a small animal. It's time for a light beer.' Why not a realistic beer commercial like, 'It's five o'clock in the morning. You just pissed on a dumpster. It's Miller time.'

I saw a commercial on late night TV, it said,'Forget everything you know about slipcovers.' So I did. And it was a load off my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, and I didn't know what the hell they were.

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.

The sponsor of an hour's television program is not buying merely the six minutes devoted to commercial message. He is determining, within broad limits, the sum total of the impact of the entire hour. If he always, invariably, reaches for the largest possible audience, then this process of insulation, of escape from reality, will continue to be massively financed, and its apologist will continue to make winsome speeches about giving the public what it wants, or 'letting the public decide.'

There are less than a dozen independent newspapers in the whole country, and even that small number is dependent on advertisers and other things, and all these other things which revolve around money and profit make real independence impossible. No newspaper which is supporting one class of society is independent.

Calm down dear, it's a commercial.

...evidence-based approach, the U.S. negotiators argued, is interference with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive. [...] the claim itself is kind of amusing, I mean, even if you believe the free market rhetoric for a moment. The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that, which brings us back to the viability of American democracy. For many years, elections here, election campaigns, have been run by the public relations industry and each time it's with increasing sophistication. And quite naturally, the industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information, and similarly, to undermine democracy by same method, projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information. The candidates are trained, carefully trained, to project a certain image. Intellectuals like to make fun of George Bush's use of phrases like 'misunderestimate,' and so on, but my strong suspicion is that he's trained to do that. He's carefully trained to efface the fact that he's a spoiled frat boy from Yale, and to look like a Texas roughneck kind of ordinary guy just like you, just waiting to get back to the ranch that they created for him...

There's one aspect of the right-wing fury about cutting off Imus that I agree with. They argue, I suppose rightly, that Imus was pulled off because of pressure from advertisers. Correct me if I missed something, but in the coverage and debate over this matter I failed to notice the observation that it is indeed wrong for advertisers to have any influence whatsoever on media content, one of the aspects in which the media depart very far from any ideal of freedom of press.

'We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes...' (pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice) This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?

There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas... I thought up the Seven Deadly Sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising.

Airing anti-Rush Limbaugh commercials during the Rush Limbaugh show would only conflict with the listeners who have chosen to listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Our salmon sandwiches are so good you'll want to swim upstream to our kitchen and spawn. But please don't.

Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad - ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car . I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor.

[advertising for McCreedy Funeral Services] Bodies that look so good, you're gonna wanna talk to it!

[in a Prune Candy commercial, singing] Dragon foot, bamboo pole, little mouse, Chinese boy, Prune Candy!

Why the Hell Not? -campaign slogan

[doing a Big Red commercial] If you don't chew it, then get outta my face. Mother f**ker

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

But first, an exciting new product from Peenman Enterprises!

We're hoping to get car washes to put up a sign that says, 'THIS CAR WASH CAN CAUSE FEAR.'

I did a little promo work for a show called Africa Nowwwwwww...that's how they have me say it.

(advertising for a dairy company) Tell them that Herb Sewell, convicted child-molester sent you.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

Seeing a murder on television can : help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.

'My name is Mrs. Smith, I've made apples out of bread and dripping, a bit of green paint, and corrugated iron.' 'No, these are horrible apples, Mrs. Smith. Go away, Mrs. Smith! Go away until your daughter has a baby.' 'Shag, daughter, shag! It's a marketing idea, shag for babies! (mimes running back) My daughter's had a baby, I'm Granny Smith now!' 'Come in, Granny Smith! You're a wonderful idea, you! Come in with your shiny apples.'

Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

'Hey Booker, Got Milk?' (During a fight with Booker T in a grocery store)

There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously, though. If you are, do. No, really. There's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, okay? Kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No, this is not a joke, if you're going: 'There's going to be a joke coming.' There's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked, and you are fucking us. Kill yourself, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself. Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going: 'He's doing a joke.' There's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. 'Oh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart.' Oh man. I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags! 'Oh, you know what Bill's doing now? He's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. Lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research. Huge market. He's doing a good thing.' God damn it, I'm not doing that, you scumbags. Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet! 'Oh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that.' God, I'm just caught in a fucking web. 'Oh, the trapped dollar. Big dollar, huge dollar. Good market, look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar :' How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you? 'What did you do today, honey?' 'Oh, we made arsenic childhood food. Now, good night. Yeah, we just said, you know, is your baby really too loud? You know : yeah, the mums will love it, yeah.' Sleep like fucking children, don't you? This is your world, isn't it?