advertising on Inadequacy

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...

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

...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.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture…. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s de...

The incessant witless repetition of advertisers' moron-fodder has become so much a part of life that, if we are not careful, we forget to be insulted by it.

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

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

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...

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research...

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

In this post-truth world, any marketing BS seems tolerable.

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.

Advertising is literally an attempt to monetize our restlessness.

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

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...

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

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

“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...

Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...

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

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.

“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.”

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

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

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

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

The influence of the familiar on our lives is something that advertisers never forget. The point of advertising is to capitalize on real needs or to create needs and then to provide a product to fill ...

Princess Buttercup: “You mock my pain. Man in Black: Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

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