advertising on Advertising

I once heard a sermon that compared believers to commercials for God. “And God doesn’t need any bad commercials,” I remember the preacher saying. It stuck with me, and from then on I often made decisi...

You might have heard the story about the dog food company. They launched a new line of dog food, stocking it on shelves nationwide, but it didn’t sell well at all. Sales plummeted and the leadership d...

On his hundredth birthday, a reporter asked the man the inevitable question: “What do you attribute your long life to?” The old man replied, “I haven’t decided yet. I’m still negotiating with a supple...

“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, w...

Advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news it is worthless.

Salt was salt was salt, what was the point of having two or three salt companies?”

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.

Ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images, and concepts of success and worth.”

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

...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.

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

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of foot-binding.

“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 Draper: This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your...

Brands are the new religion.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society const...

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

Original Sin has great marketing potential.

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

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.

Advertisements in a newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a community than the editorial columns are.

Advertising is literally an attempt to monetize our restlessness.

The advertiser is the over rewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court.

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.

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

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commo...

The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.”