Advertising Quotes

I was in advertising for years. That was cushy, you know? It's pretty cushy in a lot of ways, but I hated it.

Somebody says, 'Do a Tom Bodett, a folksy kind of thing,' and it sounds like something out of 'Hee Haw,' very insulting. They turn wry humor into disparaging sarcasm, and you get what amounts to insulting advertising.

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

The spectacle of advertising creates images of false beauty so suave and so impossible to attain that you will hurt inside and never even know where the hurt comes from, and in all pictures now the famous people have already begun to look lost and lonely.

Local brands evoke national pride, are seen as less profit-oriented, and are often formed on deep local insights. But quality worries persist, innovation is questioned, the information can be woefully inadequate, they are sometimes seen to be opaque and their advertising is clearly recognised as not being of a global standard. For local brands, quality, innovation and transparency are critical hills to climb.

The tricks and artifices of advertising are available to the seller of the better product no less than to the seller of the poorer product. But only the former enjoys the advantage derived from the better quality of his product.

An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.

The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men - the man he is and the man he wants to be.

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

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

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.

Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.

An incredible advertising career is not about creating an incredibly amazing ad, it's about making an incredible amazing ad every single day of your career, it's about getting those adds killed, and resurrecting them over and over again. It's about your season average not that occasional home-run.

I see The Gap ads as being a great example of how branding has changed. Those Gap campaigns are pop culture. They've been incredibly powerful. They have had the kind of effect on culture that a hit band has. Just look at The Gap's Khaki swing ads, which were music videos. They had this tremendous impact on the industry - suddenly everything started looking like Gap ads and it became difficult to know who was co-opting whom and who was creating culture.

My background is advertising: I moved to New York from London in 1998 to start up the U.S. office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

The thinner a newspaper or magazine is - due to reduced revenue from advertising dollars - the less editorial content because of the standard ad-to-editorial ratio, and the less money there is to support investigative journalism.

Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn.

You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can't do a great ad without good typography.

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

The copy of an ad is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the product goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

The ad industry isn't struggling for a new set of principles or abandoning the ones that made it great from the start. It's simply in the midst of a business cycle. I don't think it's more profound than that. And despite the economic downturn, I'm having more fun today than at any other moment in my 30-year advertising career. The game is more interesting and more relevant than ever.

Examples of exaggeration can be found in almost any advertising medium. The use of the superlative is altogether too prevalent. 'The finest,' 'the best,' 'the greatest,' 'the purest,' 'the most economical,' and so on ad infinitum, are hurled at the public everywhere. Surely not all products of the same class can be the best or the finest.

I just saw an ad the other day that I couldn't believe. There was this woman-and I think it's degrading to womankind-she was going out of her mind over a new product called "A Thousand Flushes." Here she was in her toilet, saying, "Oh, I love this product!" and, "My life is complete!" Good God-if your joy depends on "A Thousand Flushes," you're sick!

America Online customers are upset because the company has decided to allow advertising in its chat rooms. I can see why: you got computer sex, you can download pornography, people are making dates with 10 year-olds. Hey, what's this? A Pepsi ad? They're ruining the integrity of the Internet!

Advertising isnt just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.

It would be nice to spend billions on schools and roads, but right now that money is desperately needed for political ads.

It's the 'National Enquirer' for the ad people

Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed... but dull?

The program is only the excuse to get you to watch the advertising. Without the ads there would be no programs. Advertising is the true content of television and if it does not remain so, then advertisers will cease to support the medium, and television will cease to exist as the popular entertainment it presently is.

Some jobs are worse than actual wives. Ad agency vs. Matrimony, for instance: Even the most capricious and demanding spouse is not going to divorce you for refusing to spend forty hours a week making up lies about toilet paper.

Infiniti ads are part of an exciting new trend called "Advertising Whose Sole Purpose Is to Irritate You."

I remember the day we were hanging around the band's commune and Roger came in with the press kit for a rock band (Moby Grape) any of us had ever seen. It looked psychedelic, yet it was done by ad people. I believe the word "hype" was coined on that very day.

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

Client companies and advertising agencies are old-world-order places. The systems and processes and structures come from a time when you shot the TV commercial, then you did the print ads, then you did everything else - including the website. Everything has changed, but the systems haven't.

A lot of weird ads. Sally Struthers with that little kid: 'Just 55 cents, the price of a cup of coffee, feeds this kid and his family for a week.' Yeah, where is that? 'Cause I wanna move there.

Classified ads of the Ku Klux Klan: Tired of all the games? Do you like racial purity, horses and dressing up like a ghost?

It's very complicated. There's been this broader mechanism, an industry, which wants people to use free services, from the old days of advertising-supported papers and magazines, to ad-supported free television.

In the last couple of weeks I have seen the ads for the Wonder Bra. Is that really a problem in this country? Men not paying enough attention to women’s breasts?

I started noticing a lot of big companies are bored with ads; they feel sort of lost in the advertising world. They're not into magazines anymore.

The conservative side of our political spectrum has had an outsized voice over the last few years. I think especially since the establishment of Fox News, which has created an echo chamber in which people just hear the same ideas repeated ad infinitum. And you know, it's just basic advertising, basically. You hear the same idea over and over again. Or you can call it propaganda if you like.

No amount of advertising can repair the damage done by failing to properly address a customer's concern.

Advertising doesn't cause addictions. But it does create a climate of denial and it contributes mightily to a belief in the quick fix, instant gratification, the dreamworld, and escape from all pain and boredom. All of this is part of what addicts believe and what we hope for when we reach for our particular substance.... Addiction begins with the hope that something "out there" can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. Advertising is all about this false hope.

The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

Companies spend twenty, thirty, forty percent of revenues on advertising to brand their product and to get, essentially, acquire customers cheaply. You get a lot of exposure on something like this.

The point is, this is what happens when advertising and data collection is the dominant business mode. We are encouraged to be compulsive. It's not that we're terrible addicts who need to go to an AA meeting and get off our gadgets.

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.