Advertising
By Jef Richards
jef[at]mail.utexas.edu
http://advertising.utexas.edu/research/quotes
Advertisements:
Below
you will find a variety of quotes concerning some aspect or effect of
advertising. Some are pithy, some are pointed, and others are simply important.
I've even sprinkled a few of my own quotes among them. I hope you find
these useful.
Jef I. Richards
ADVERTISING IS . . .
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"Advertising is the principal reason why the business man has come to inherit
the earth."
-
- - James Randolph Adams, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 12.
-
"Advertising is of the very essence of democracy. An election goes on every minute
of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and
shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which manufacturer
and which product shall be the leader today, and which shall lead tomorrow."
-
- - Bruce Barton (1955), chairman of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 82.
-
"Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret . . . to put the very heart throbs
of a business into type, paper and ink."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted by Joan Kufrin, Leo Burnett: Star Reacher(1995),
Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, Inc., p. 54.
-
"Advertising is what you do when you can't go see somebody. That's all it
is."
-
- - Fairfax Cone (1963), ad agency partner, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.
- "Advertising is the life of trade."
-
- - Calvin Coolidge, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 13.
-
"Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats."
-
- - Northrop Frye, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 18.
-
"The art of publicity is a black art."
-
- - Learned Hand, American jurist, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 19.
- "[A]dvertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation."
-
- - S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action (1964), New York: Harcourt, p. 268.
-
"Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising
if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can't."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 203.
-
Advertising is "the lubricant for the free-enterprise system."
-
- - Leo-Arthur Kelmenson (1976), quoted in Michael McKenna,
The Stein & Day Dictionary of Definitive Quotations, 1983, New York:
Stein & Day Publishing Co., p. 11.
- "Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long
enough to get money from it."
-
- - Stephen Butler Leacock, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political
Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 1.
- "Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan (1976), Canadian social scientist (quoted in Robert Andrews, The Routledge Dictionary of
Quotations 1987, p. 5, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
- "Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 19.
- "Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, introduction to Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction:
Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974, New York: Signet
(New American Library), p. vii.
- "Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
-
- - George Orwell, quoted in Angela Partington, The Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations, 1992, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 501.
- Advertising is "[a] ten billion dollar a year misunderstanding with the public."
-
- - Chester L. Posey, Senior V.P. & Creative Director, McCann Erickson
- "Advertising is, actually, a simple phenomenon in terms of economics. It is
merely a substitute for a personal sales force - an extension, if you will, of
the merchant who cries aloud his wares."
-
- - Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising (1986), New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc., p. 145.
-
"Advertising is the 'wonder' in Wonder Bread."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
- "Advertising is the art and sole of capitalism. It captures a moment of time through the lens of commerce, reflecting and affecting our lives, making us laugh and cry, while simultaneously giving traction to the engine that propels this free market economy forward into the future."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (2001), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
- "Advertising is the modern substitute for argument;
its function is to make the worse appear the better."
-
- - George Santayana
- "Advertising is the foot on the accelerator, the hand on the throttle, the spur on the
flank that keeps our economy surging forward."
-
- - Robert W. Sarnoff, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 15.
- "The simplest definition of advertising, and one that will probably meet the
test of critical examination, is that advertising is selling in print."
-
- - Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw
Company, p. 5.
-
"Advertising is selling Twinkies to adults"
-
- - Donald R. Vance
- "Advertising is legalized lying."
-
- - H.G. Wells, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political
Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 2.
-
"Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort,
luxury and ease for millions."
-
- - William Allen White, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 15.
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ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES
-
"To many advertising account executives, chronic nervous dyspepsia, psychosomatic
tension, and hyperacidity are more than just medical words used in television
commercials. These are the very real terms
that describe what is probably the most common occupational disease off the
advertising game."
-
- - Harry R. Gasker, quoted in Samm Sinclair Baker, The Permissible Lie:
The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing
Company, p. 8.
-
"The agency's account executive should be able to step into the sales manager's
shoes if the sales manager drops dead today."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 14.
-
"[N]o agency is better than its account executives."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 16.
-
"The ultimate test of a finished account executive is his ability to write a
sound marketing plan."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 27.
-
"If I had to sum it all up, I'd say there are three breeds of account executives:
the play-it-safe-and-by-the-rule-book transmitting agent; the neutralist,
who's never quite sure from one day to the next of his role in the agency-client
relationship; and the truly creative account man, who may never write a line
of copy in his life, but who, in his own wy, is every bit as creative as the
finest copywriter in the business."
-
- - Emil Mogul (1960), ad executive, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.
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AGENCY CLIENTS
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"The most dangerous thing that can happen to us, I think, is to permit a feeling
to develop that any client is a problem. I have always taken the attitude that
no account is a 'problem account' but that all accounts have important problems
attached
to them - that you can waste more time and burn up more nervous energy by fighting
a problem than by taking a positive attitude and solving it. It sure gives you
a nice, warm glow when you do."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 75.
-
"I have learned that you can't have good advertising without a good client,
that you can't keep a good client without good advertising, and no client will
ever buy better advertising than he understands or has an appetite for."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 57.
-
"I have learned that trying to guess what the boss or the client wants is the
most debilitating of all influences in the creation of good advertising."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 37.
- "Most agencies run scared, most of the time. . . . Frightened people are powerless
to produce good advertising. . . . If I were a client, I would do everything in
my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them
long-term contracts."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 64.
- "It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them. Many clients
are surrounded by buckpassers who make a fine art of blaming the agency for their own failures. I
seize the earliest opportunity to assume the blame."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 55.
- To advertisers: "Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a
dog and bark yourself?"
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 68.
- "I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good
manners."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 53.
- "I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I
have a previous engagement with another client; successful polygamy depends upon
pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 52.
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AGENCY HIRING
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"The inventory goes down the elevator every night."
-
- - Fairfax Cone, of Foote Cone & Belding, quoted in John O'Toole, The
Trouble
with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York:
Chelsea House, p. 59.
- "People don't buy from clowns."
-
- - Claude Hopkins, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985,
New York: Vintage Books, p. 103.
- "If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of
dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a
company of giants."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 47.
- "I'd like to ask each and every one of you how many remarkable people, or people of any kind, you
personally have discovered or brought in in the last year. That's a job that I think is too vital for
you to delegate... what kind of people should you discover and hire? Well, policemen and tobacco
farmers, not MBAs! Clients have got MBAs! Hire the kind of people clients don't have and
wouldn't dream of hiring. Don't go to the clients with a lot of guys who are like theirs, only not so
good -- you have to remember that clients can afford to pay far more than we can for MBAs."
-
- - David Ogilvy, from a speech to O&M Worldwide Meeting, 1989.
- "I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing
mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations
whenever they need cash for other purposes."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 42.
- "The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as
intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that
you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 42.
[ Go Top ]
ART & ARTISTS
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"Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by
the beauty of the picture - and forget that merchandise must be sold."
-
- - James Randolph Adams, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 12.
-
"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?"
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"I regard a great ad as the most beautiful thing in the world."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 94.
-
"Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings.
I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 15.
- "If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 222.
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ATTENTION
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"If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to be noticed,
but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 26.
-
"Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up beneath his notice."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 64.
-
"People are very sophisticated about advertising now. You have to entertain them.
You have to present a product honestly and with a tremendous amount of pizzazz
and flair, the way it's done in a James Bond movie. But you can't run the same
ad over and over again. You have to change your approach constantly to keep
on getting their attention . . . ."
-
- - Mary Wells Lawrence, quoted in Newsweek, October 1966.
- "You have only 30 seconds [in a TV commercial]. If you grab attention in the first
frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer.
People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something
dull ... When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 111.
- "The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of
the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the
truth, and that means rectifying whatever's wrong in the merchant's business.
If the truth isn't tellable, fix it so it is. That is about all there is to
it."
-
- - John E. Powers, 19th Century copywriter, quoted in Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers:
A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (1984), New York: William Morrow
and Company, p. 28.
- "Advertisements ordinarily work their wonders, to the extent that they work at
all, on an inattentive public."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 3.
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AWARDS
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"In the past, we have had a strategy, but our agencies didn't stick to it.
But they did make good commercials and they did win awards. This may surprise you,
though. I don't care about awards; I want to sell product."
-
- - James W. Harralson, CEO of Royal Crown Cola Company, quoted in Philip
Dougherty,
"Advertising," The New York Times, April 5, 1988, p. D23.
-
"Hollywood has its Oscars. Television has its Emmys. Broadway has its Tonys.
And advertising has its Clios. And its Andys, Addys, Effies and Obies.
And 117 other assorted awards. And those are just the big ones."
-
- - Joanne Lipman (1987), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
[ Go Top ]
BELIEF
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"The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability,
and nothing is more believable than the product itself."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 61.
-
"A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important
as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and
believed, you ain't got nothin'."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 90.
- "I believe 'credibility' is one of the biggest issues yet to be addressed by Internet advertisers. Everyone has their eye on 'privacy' as a critical concern, but credibility will be far more enabling or disabling to website profitability. A company can have a web presence and, unless the brand name is familiar, consumers have no way of knowing whether it's a big company, a small company, an honest company, or a single scoundrel. I may be worried about my personal data being disclosed in violation of my privacy, but I'm far more concerned about whether or not the person or company with whom I'm dealing is reputable. Can I believe their claims? Will I have a recourse if something is wrong with the merchandise? Credibility no longer is strictly a brick-and-morter issue. I can't judge someone by their place of business, when I conduct that business on the Internet. I can't grasp a hand and look into their eyes to judge their veracity. Credibility is a huge issue."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1999), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
-
"If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are
equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the
popular culture that advertisements are silly."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 227.
[ Go Top ]
BILLBOARDS
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"I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all."
-
- - Ogden Nash (1959), quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
- "As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a
billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I
retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will
travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon.
How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?"
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 112.
[ Go Top ]
BORING
-
"I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not
that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 18.
[ Go Top ]
BUDGETING
- "American advertisers rely on 'essentially illogical' approaches to determine their
advertising budgets."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 17.
[ Go Top ]
BUSINESS
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"What helps people, helps business."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 12.
-
"I long for the day when advertising will become a business for a grown man."
-
- - Howard Luck Gossage, "Gossage on Advertising," in The Book of Gossage (1995),
Chicago, IL:
The Copy Workshop.
[ Go Top ]
COMMISSION
- "Experience has taught me that advertisers get the best results when they pay
their agency a flat fee. . . . It is unrealistic to expect your agency to be
impartial when its vested interest lies wholly in the direction of increasing
your commissionable advertising."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 71.
- "Make sure that your agency makes a profit. Your account competes with all
the other accounts in your agency. If it is unprofitable, it is unlikely that
the management of the agency will assign their best men to work on it. And
sooner or later they will cast about for a profitable account to replace yours."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 71.
[ Go Top ]
COMMITTEES
-
"When you try to formalize or socialize creative activity, the only sure result
is commercial constipation . . . . The good ideas are all hammered out in agony
by individuals, not spewed out by groups."
-
- - Charles Browder (1957), president of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 82.
-
"Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of
committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be
allowed to create them."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 70.
[ Go Top ]
COMMUNICATION
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"Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you
if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if
they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and
you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill.
For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the
communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes
a student of how people read or listen."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do
for you. Here's how to get it.'"
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 50.
-
"Words give you a medium, if you will, and make your message part of the human
thought process. Words are as portable as the human being who hears them."
-
- - James J. Jordan, Jr., quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers
Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 107.
- "I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of
information."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 7.
-
"As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed
noise."
-
- - George Will (1976), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 71.
[ Go Top ]
CONSUMERISM
-
"Consumerism is an antipollution drive in relation to the toxic areas of advertising."
-
- - Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord, 1974, New York: Anchor Books, p.
78.
[ Go Top ]
CONSUMERS
-
"The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness
of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire
to seduce than from the desire to be seduced."
-
- - Daniel J. Boorstin, U.S. historian, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
-
"If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in
the ad writing business at all."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 19.
-
"Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by
the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity,
impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence
of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility."
-
- - Joseph Conrad
-
"A man who is hungry need never be told of his need for food. If he is inspired
by his appetite, he is immune to the influence of Messrs. Batten, Barton, Durstine
& Osborn. The latter are effective only with those who are so far removed from
physical want that they do not already know what they want."
-
- - John Kenneth Galbraith (1958), economics professor, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.
-
"Advertising is found in societies which have passed the point of satisfying the
basic animal needs."
-
- - Marion Harper, Jr. (1960), president of McCann-Erickson, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.
-
"The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection
to being eaten by the wolf."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, Canadian communications theorist, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
-
"The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York:
Ballantine, p. 84.
-
"The novice at advertising frequently gives the public credit for too much
intelligence."
-
- - Printers' Ink, September 2 (1903), quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers:
Inside the World of Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 163.
-
"[D]ifferent groups are differentially vulnerable to advertising; and
their vulnerability varies not so much with the character or quantity of
advertisements
as with the informational resources they can claim by age, education, station in
life, and government guarantees of consumer protection."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. xvi.
[ Go Top ]
CONTENT
-
"Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you.
Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that
will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never
been said before."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"There is no such thing as 'soft sell' and 'hard sell.' There is only 'smart
sell' and 'stupid sell.'"
-
- - Charles Browder (1958), president of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 83.
-
"Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it
fun to read."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 79.
-
"The more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement's chance for
success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included
in the advertisement increases."
-
- - Dr. Charles Edwards, quoted in Leonard Safir and William Safire, Good Advice,
1982, New York: Times Books, p. 6.
-
"That is the kind of ad I like. Facts, facts, facts."
-
- - Samuel Goldwyn, U.S. film producer, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to
the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to give
it memory value."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 33.
-
"To establish a favorable and well-defined brand personality with the consumer the
advertiser must be consistent. You can't use a comic approach today and
a scientist in a white jacket tomorrow without diffusing and damaging your brand
personality."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 203.
-
"The right name is an advertisement in itself."
-
- - Claude C. Hopkins, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 12.
-
"Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement."
-
- - Samuel Johnson (1759), English author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"Advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news it is
worthless."
-
- - Adolph S. Ochs (1958), quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
-
"What you say in advertising is more important than how you say
it."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 63.
- "What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content
of your advertising, not its form."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 81.
- "The headline is the 'ticket on the meat.' Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of
product you are advertising."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 92.
- "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."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 92.
- "I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had
no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I
didn't know what it meant myself."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 99.
-
"I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of
the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my
life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 85.
- "Braggin' IS advertisin'"
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1997), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
[ Go Top ]
COPYWRITING
-
"I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than
it is to write a good ad."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 27.
-
"If you are writing about baloney, don't try to make it Cornish hen, because that
is the worst kind of baloney there is. Just make it darned good baloney."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 23.
-
"I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius
to keep his hands off a good one."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 53.
-
"I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form
of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes . . . ."
-
- - Philip Dusenberry, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the
World of
Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 56.
-
"I think central to good writing of advertising, or anything else, is a person
who has developed an understanding of people, an insight into them, a sympathy
toward them. I think that that develops more sharply when the writer has not
had an easy adjustment to living. So that they have themselves felt the need
for understanding, the need for sympathy, and can therefore see that need in
other people."
-
- - George Gribbin, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 51.
-
"A writer should be joyous, an optimist . . . Anything that implies rejection of
life is wrong for a writer."
-
- - George Gribbin, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 48.
-
"I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all,
the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities.
I mean the advertisement . . . . It is far easier to write ten passably effective
Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective
advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public."
-
- - Aldous Huxley (1923), British author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"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."
-
- - Louis Kronenberger (1954), quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
- "Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter,
rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within
an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?"
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 78.
-
"I don't know the rules of grammar. . . . If you're trying to persuade people to
do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language,
the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to
write in the vernacular."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 93.
-
"Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had
a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able
to write."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 70.
-
"You must make the product interesting, not just make the ad different.
And that's what too many of the copywriters in the U.S. today don't yet
understand."
-
- - Rosser Reeves, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 125.
-
"No, I don't think a 68-year-old copywriter . . . can write with the kids.
That he's as creative. That he's as fresh. But he may be a better surgeon.
His ad may not be quite as fresh and glowing as the Madison Ave. fraternity would
like to see it be, and yet he might write an ad that will produce five times the
sales. And that's the name of the game, isn't it?"
-
- - Rosser Reeves, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 111.
- "I suspect that there is no other single profession that does more to contribute to our annoying linguistic convolutions than advertising, unless it's politics."
-
- - Jef Richards (1997), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
-
"The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain
words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in
a letter or told to an acquaintance."
-
- - George P. Rowell, quoted in Advertiser's Gazette, (July 1870), vol. 4, p.
175.
[ Go Top ]
COST
-
"To Mrs. Mufoosky, the commercials may seem as long as a whore's dream.
But to the new advertiser who has spent 100 Gs for his first network commercial
- he gets a new understanding of a split second. It's the fastest half minute
of his lifetime."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 151.
-
"It is very likely that many firms spend more on advertising than, for their own
best interests, they should."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 18.
[ Go Top ]
CREATIVITY
-
"Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"Properly practiced creativity MUST result in greater sales more economically
achieved.
Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness
and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 18.
-
"The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of
new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures
into new relationships."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 72.
-
"Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of
great creative people."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 26.
- "Creativity is an advertising agency's most valuable asset, because it is the rarest."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (2001), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
[ Go Top ]
CRITICS
- "Advertising is not the noblest creation of man's mind, as so many of its advocates
would like the public to think. It does not, single-handedly, sustain the whole
structure of capitalism and democracy in the Free World. It is just as nonsensical
to suggest that we are superhuman as to accept the indictment that we are subhuman.
We are merely human, trying to do a necessary human job with dignity, with decency
and with competence."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York:
Vintage Books, p. 206.
-
"In essence, the motivation of the attacks on advertising is hostility toward
capitalism and egoism."
-
- - Jerry Kirkpatrick, "A Philosophic Defense of Advertising," Journal of
Advertising, 1986, vol. 15(2).
-
"The list of sins committed by advertising is limited only by the creativity of
its critics."
-
- - Jerry Kirkpatrick, "A Philosophic Defense of Advertising," Journal of
Advertising, 1986, vol. 15(2).
-
"People I meet at parties, once they discover how I make my living, feel compelled
to tell me about the low regard in which they hold advertising. But in return
for my listening to their complaints, they have to answer some questions too.
I ask them what they think of Hallmark's advertising, or Kraft's, or the Raid
advertising with those cute bugs. Oh, well, that's different."
-
- - John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York:
Chelsea House, p. 27.
-
"I wish all consumers were as gullible as advertising's biggest critics. Anyone who
believes advertising is that powerful will believe almost anything."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin.
-
"Advertising is much less powerful than advertisers and critics of advertising
claim, and advertising agencies are stabbing in the dark much more than they
are practicing precision microsurgery on the public consciousness."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. xiii.
-
"Most criticism of advertising is written in ignorance of what actually happens
inside these agencies."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 45.
- "Critics of advertising usually forget that if it were eliminated or abolished,
other methods would necessarily be substituted for it. If you abolished the
advertising of hats, either by law or by common agreement, the same manufacturers would
resort to other methods of competition in personal salesmanship to a corresponding
extent. This might be and probably would be a still more costly means to attain
the same ends that are accomplished through printed publicity."
-
- - Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw
Company, p. 113.
[ Go Top ]
ECONOMICS
-
"Advertising did not invent the products or services which called forth jobs,
nor inspire the pioneering courage that built factories and machinery to produce
them. What advertising did was to stimulate ambition and desire - the craving to
process, which is the strongest incentive to produce. To satisfy this craving
the factory was impelled to turn itself into a growing factory; and then, by
the pressure of mass demand, into many factories. Mass production made possible
mass economies, reflected in declining prices, until the product that began as
the luxury of the rich became the possession of every family that was willing to
work."
-
- - Bruce Barton (1955), chairman of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 82.
-
"To think that the effects of advertising, such a potent environment in any
industrialized country, could be limited to economics, is as absurd as assuming that
the effects of a hot climate upon a culture could be limited to tropical diseases."
-
- - William Kuhns, Waysteps to Eden: Ads and Commercials (1970), New York:
Herder and Herder.
-
"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest
way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."
-
- - Sinclair Lewis (1943), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"There is no way for the American economic system to function without advertising.
There is no other way to communicate enough information about enough products
to enough people with enough speed."
-
- - John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York:
Chelsea House, p. 3.
-
"Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from preconising [proclaiming]
its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is
transformed. The enemies of advertising are enemies of freedom."
-
- - J. Enoch Powell, British Conservative politician, quoted in Robert Andrews, The
Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 19.
[ Go Top ]
EDUCATION
-
"Claude Hopkins . . . maintained that nobody with a college education could write
an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 86.
[ Go Top ]
EFFECTS
-
"As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world.
The first four words ever uttered, "Let there be light," constitute its charter.
All nature is vibrant with its impulse."
-
- - Bruce Barton, chairman of BBDO, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 13.
- "Advertising mourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man
the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his
family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production."
-
- - Sir Winston Churchill, quoted in David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising
Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 133.
-
"There is something of a parasitic quality about advertising. It feeds on
the organisms of noncommercial culture - the culture's past and present, ideology
and myths, politics and customs, art and architecture, literature and music,
and even its religions . . . . For example, women are commodified to sell everything
from cars to colognes . . . . Advertising thus pimps its products."
-
- - Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, "Commerce & Communication," 71
Texas Law Review 697 (1993), p. 709-10.
-
"Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising."
-
- - Calvin Coolidge (1926), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
- "There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product.
When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster."
-
- - Jerry Della Famina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl
Harbor (1971), New York: Pocket Books, p. 141.
-
"Contrary to what self-appointed protectors of the consumer so loudly proclaim,
advertising does not cause people to buy bad products. Nothing will put a bad product
out of business faster than a good advertising campaign. Advertising causes people to try
a product once, but poor quality eliminates any possibility of a repeat purpose."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 101.
-
"It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without
being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease
therein dealt with in its most virulent form."
-
- - Jerome K. Jerome (1889), quoted in Tony Augarde, Oxford Dictionary of
Modern Quotations, 1991, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 113.
- "[T]he business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with
some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our
minds."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, "The Age of Advertising," Commonweal, (1953),
58, p. 557.
-
"I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his
advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell
a product."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 14.
-
"[A]dvertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to
initiate them."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 207.
-
"Expensive, well-executed, and familiar ads convince the investors, as nothing in
the black and white tables of assets and debits can, that the company is important
and prosperous."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. xiv.
-
"We find that advertising works the way the grass grows. You can never see
it, but every week you have to mow the lawn."
-
- - Andy Tarshis, A.C. Nielsen Company, quoted in Martin Mayer, Whatever Happened to
Madison Avenue?
Advertising in the '90s (1991), Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, p.
179-80.
-
"Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."
-
- - Mark Twain, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant
Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.
-
"General advertising is Cyrano. He comes under your window and sings; people get
used to it and ignore it. But if Roxane responds, there's a relationship.
We move the brand relationship up a notch. Advertising becomes a dialogue
that becomes an invitation to a relationship."
-
- - Lester Wunderman, Young & Rubicam, quoted in Martin Mayer, Whatever Happened to
Madison Avenue?
Advertising in the '90s (1991), Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, p.
143.
[ Go Top ]
EFFECTIVENESS
- "The effectiveness of advertising depends on the amount and kind of product information
available to consumers . . . . advertising will be more successful the more impoverished
the consumer's information environment."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 90-91.
[ Go Top ]
EMOTION
-
"You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You've got
to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if
they don't feel it, nothing will happen."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
[ Go Top ]
ENVY
-
"The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys
the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into
an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself
as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product."
-
- - John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1980, London: British Broadcasting
Corporation and Penguin Books, p. 134.
[ Go Top ]
EVIL
-
Advertising is "an evil service."
-
- - Aneurin Bevan, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World
of
Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.
-
"Advertising is an instrument in the hands of the people who use it. If evil
men use advertising for base purposes, then evil can result. If honest men
use advertising to sell an honest product with honest enthusiasm, then positive good
for our kind of capitalistic society can result."
-
- - John W. Crawford, communications professor, quoted in Samm Sinclair Baker,
The
Permissible Lie:
The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing
Company, p. 180.
-
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."
-
- - Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the
World of
Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.
-
"Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), New York: Vintage Books,
p. 207.
- "I did not feel 'evil' when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They
helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on
the edge of starvation for 400 years."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 207.
-
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."
-
- - Pope John Paul II, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the
World of
Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.
-
I can not "think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an
evil."
-
- - Arnold Toynbee, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World
of
Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.
[ Go Top ]
FANTASY & DREAMS
-
"Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism
could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream."
-
- - John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1980, London: British Broadcasting
Corporation and Penguin Books, p. 154.
-
"We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising.
I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that
mud will give you a perfect complexion."
-
- - Zelda Fitzgerald (1932), U.S. writer, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"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."
-
- - J. B. Priestley, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant
Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 14.
[ Go Top ]
FREE SPEECH / CENSORSHIP
-
"Legislation should outlaw an advertiser's attempts to use its economic relationships
with a media enterprise to influence the enterprise not to print or broadcast content
that it would otherwise choose to present . . . . There is little reason to
allow this use of economic power to censor others' speech and to block the public's
access to information or viewpoints."
-
- - C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press, 1994, Princeton,
NJ:
Princeton University Press, p. 100.
-
"Advertisers, not governments, are the primary censors of media content in
the United States today."
-
- - C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press, 1994, Princeton,
NJ:
Princeton University Press, p. 99.
-
"It is not easy to describe the present position of legal opinion on advertising and
free speech. Only a poet can capture the essence of chaos."
-
- - R. H. Coase, "Advertising and Free Speech," 6 Journal of Legal Studies
1 (1977), p. 32.
-
"Advertising, the dissemination of messages about the goods and services which
people consume, is clearly part of the market for ideas. Intellectuals have
not, in general, welcomed this other occupant of their domain. And the feeling
of antipathy has been shared by economists, who, until comparatively recently, have
tended to deplore rather than to analyze the effects of advertising."
-
- - R. H. Coase, "Advertising and Free Speech," 6 Journal of Legal Studies
1 (1977), p. 8.
-
"Historically, it was thought that the sole or primary enemy of free expression was
the State. Today, the consequences of commercial communication reveal that the
private captains of the advertising empire may prove to be an enemy of equal
stature."
-
- - Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, "Commerce & Communication," 71
Texas Law Review 697 (1993), p. 726-27.
-
"Liberals don't much like commercial speech because it's commercial; conservatives
mistrust it because it's speech."
-
- - Alex Kozinski and Stuart Banner, "Who's Afraid of Commercial Speech?" 76
Virginia Law Review 627 (1990), p. 652.
- "Commercial speech is like obscenity ... we can't seem to define it,
but we know it when we see it."
-
- - Jef Richards (1996), Associate Professor of Advertising, The University of Texas at Austin.
-
"Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared
to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak,
commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health."
-
- - Rodney A. Smolla, "Information, Imagery, and the First Amendment: A Case for
Expansive Protection of Commercial Speech," 71 Texas Law Review 777 (1993),
p. 797.
-
"The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are
having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by
the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form
of expression?"
-
- - Calvin Trillin (1986), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 71.
[ Go Top ]
FREQUENCY
-
"In communications, familiarity breeds apathy."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"The value of an ad is in inverse ratio to the number of times it has been used."
-
- - Raymond Rubicam
[ Go Top ]
FUN
-
"In my opinion, fun is what makes advertising successful."
-
- - Leo Bogart, quoted in Martin Mayer, Whatever Happened to Madison Avenue?
Advertising in the '90s (1991), Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, p.
28.
-
"Fun without sell gets nowhere but sell without fun tends to become obnoxious."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 8.
-
"Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun.
Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in
business."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 66.
- "I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes
on."
-
- - Jerry Della Famina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl
Harbor (1971), New York: Pocket Books, p. 256.
[ Go Top ]
FUTURE
-
"Advertising is the king's messenger in this day of economic democracy.
All unknowing a new force has been let loose in the world. Those who understand it
will have one of the keys to the future."
-
- - Editorial, "Messenger to the King," Collier's, 1930 (May 3), p. 78.
-
"[T]here will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled
up with the advertisements of things."
-
- - William Dean Howells, quoted in Jackson Lears,
Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America,
1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 286.
-
"Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time
are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of
its entire range of activities."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan
-
"When the historian of the Twentieth Century shall have finished his narrative, and
comes searching for the subtitle which shall best express the spirit of the
period, we think it not at all unlikely that he may select 'The Age of Advertising'
for the purpose."
-
- - Printers' Ink, (May 27, 1915), vol. 91, p. 102.
- "The Death of Advertising? I think that's in the book of Revelation. It's the day when people everywhere become satisfied with their weight, their hair, their skin, their wardrobe, and their aroma."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1999), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
-
"Advertising is on its deathbed and it will not survive long, having contracted a
fatal case of new technology."
-
- - Roland T. Rust and Richard W. Oliver, "The Death of Advertising," Journal
of Advertising, 1994, 23(4): 71-77, p. 76.
[ Go Top ]
GENERALLY
-
"There is no such thing as a permanent advertising success."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 5.
-
"Advertising moves people toward goods; merchandising moves goods toward people."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 36.
-
"I believe that a contract, or at least an understanding, exists between the
American public and the American advertiser concerning what advertising is,
what its limitations are and what price people will pay for it."
-
- - John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York:
Chelsea House, p. 28.
[ Go Top ]
HONESTY
-
"No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't
exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"Regardless of the moral issue, dishonesty in advertising has proved very
unprofitable."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 17.
-
"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, U.S. author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"The first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise . . . and cultivate
the delightfully vague."
-
- - John Crosby (1947), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."
-
- - Thomas Jefferson, quoted in H.L. Menchen, A New Dictionary of Quotations,
1946, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 17.
-
"Folks with their wits about them knew that advertisements were just a pack of
lies - you had only to look at the claims of patent medicines!"
-
- - Frances Parkinson Keyes, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"In the ad biz, sincerety is a commodity bought and paid for like everything else."
-
- - Newsweek (1967), quoted in Wesley Douglas Comp, Comps Unfamiliar
Quotations, 1990, New Jersey: Prentice Hall., p. 4.
- "It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy
a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 57.
-
"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. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out
- either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who
will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can
be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product is good,
you have no business to be advertising it."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York:
Ballantine Books, p. 87.
- "If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out - either by the Government,
which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your
product a second time."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 87.
- "There is one catagory of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly
dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), New York: Vintage Books,
p. 209.
- "There is a huge difference between journalism and advertising. Journalism aspires to truth. Advertising is regulated for truth. I'll put the accuracy of the average ad in this country up against the average news story any time."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1999), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
- "If its not done ethically, advertising won't be trusted. If consumers don't trust it, advertising is pointless."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (2000), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
-
"Why, I ask, isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud,
presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all by the
advertising men who create it?"
-
- - David Riesman, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant
Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.
- "Even if, as is generally the case, everything that the ad says about the product
is scrupulously honest, or at any rate scrupulously avoids outright dishonesty,
the implication of the direct address of most commercials - that the announcer speaks
with the viewer's welfare at heart - is fraudulent."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 10.
- "[L]ying and cheating in advertising, in the long run, are commercial suicide.
Dishonesty in advertising destroys not only confidence in advertising, but
also in the medium which carries the dishonest advertisement. . . . No one can
be ill in a community without endangering others; no advertiser can be dishonest
without casting suspicion upon others."
-
- - Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw
Company, p. 437.
-
"The big print giveth and the small print taketh away."
-
- - Tom Waitts, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political
Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 1.
[ Go Top ]
HYPNOSIS
-
"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."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of man, 1964,
New York: New American Library, Inc., p. 205.
[ Go Top ]
IDEA / CONCEPT
-
"To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off
having ideas."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 2.
-
"I have learned to respect ideas, wherever they come from. Often they come from
clients. Account executives often have big creative ideas, regardless of what
some writers think."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 52.
-
"Make the layouts rough and the ideas fancy."
-
- - Stavros Cosmopulos, of Cosmopulos, Crowley & Daly, Inc.
-
"Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. Don't forget
that, all of you who don't have them."
-
- - John Elliott, Jr., quoted in Leonard Safir and William Safire, Good Advice,
1982, New York: Times Books, p. 7.
-
"If an ad campaign is built around a weak idea - or as is so often the case,
no idea at all - I don't give a damn how good the execution is, it's going to
fail."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 165.
-
"If you have a good selling idea, your secretary can write your ad for you."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 16.
- "It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to
buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass
like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains
a big idea."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 16.
[ Go Top ]
IMAGE
-
"An image . . . is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered
picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual,
institution, corporation, product or service."
-
- - Daniel Boorstin, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 12.
- "You now have to decide what 'image' you want for your brand. Image means
personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can
make or break them in the market place."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 14.
- "Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol
which is the brand image."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 87.
- "Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it's Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old
Crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniel's. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks
are quite different. They are tasting images."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 15.
-
"In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope."
-
- - Charles Revson, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political
Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 2.
-
"Interactive advertising will enable the further 'anthropomorphizing' of brands. In the coming years we will be giving businesses a very human persona. What consumers see will, in a very real sense, seem like a living and breathing human being. Many companies will create virtual bodies -- male, female, young or old -- as well as virtual personalities. One business may, by all appearances, be a laid-back, calm, fatherly figure, while another will have the personality of an energetic, young, party-animal. To achieve this we will start to look seriously at what makes some people uniquely popular and likable, in the hope of capturing that essence for our brand."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (2000), Chairman of the Advertising Department at The University of Texas-Austin.
[ Go Top ]
IMITATION
- "If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign,
you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let
it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 90.
[ Go Top ]
INSECURITY / UNHAPPINESS
-
"Advertising promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to improve
their economic status."
-
- - Ralph Starr Butler, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 13.
-
"Next to Christianity, advertising is the greatest force in the world. And
I say that without sacrilege or disrespect. Advertising makes people discontented.
It makes them want things they don't have. Without discontent, there is no
progress, no achievement."
-
- - Ray Locke, former owner of Tracy-Locke Co., quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's
Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 78.
-
"It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have."
-
- - B. Earl Puckett, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 71.
-
"Buy me and you will overcome the anxieties I have just reminded you of."
-
- - Michael Schudson, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 18.
-
"Advertising may make people believe they are inadequate without Product X
and that Product X will satisfactorily manage their inadequacies. More likely,
it may remind them of inadequacies they have already felt and may lead them, once
at least, to try a new product that just might help, even though they are well
aware that it probably will not."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 224.
[ Go Top ]
INTERNATIONAL
-
"Any communication or marketing professional needs
cross-cultural research and communication skills to be able to succeed in
the future."
-
- - Marye Tharp (1996), Associate Professor of Advertising, The University of Texas at
Austin.
[ Go Top ]
INTRUSIVE
-
"Never before the advent of radio did advertising have such a golden opportunity
to make an ass out of itself. Never before could advertising be so insistent and
so unmannerly and so affront its audience."
-
- - William J. Cameron (1938), director of public relations for Ford Motor
Company,
quoted in Jackson Lears,
Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America,
1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 238-39.
-
"A good advertising man is a first-class pragmatist. If he has any basic theorem
at all, it is that most advertising is an intrusion upon the time and attention of
people; a justifiable one but an intrusion nonetheless. The reader has bought
the magazine for something other than the ads . . . Therefore the copywriters undertake
to stop him in spite of himself."
-
- - Albert Lynd, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant
Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.
-
"When executing advertising, it's best to think of yourself as an uninvited guest
in the living room of a prospect who has the magical power to make you disappear
instantly."
-
- - John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York:
Chelsea House, p. 96.
-
"Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that
turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.
Commercial society finds unintelligible the idea that anything - an emotion,
activity, or product - is too 'intimately personal' for uninhibited commercial
treatment."
-
- - George Will (1975), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 71.
[ Go Top ]
JINGLES
- "The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had
to sell anything."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 117.
[ Go Top ]
LAW & REGULATION
-
"There are quite a few votes to be won by saying we will tax advertising or
stop it."
-
- - Barry Day, Vice Chairman of McCann-Erickson, quoted in Eric Clark, The
Want
Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 125.
-
"Commercials on television are similar to sex and taxes; the more talk there is
about them, the less likely they are to be curbed."
-
- - Jack Gould (1963), quoted in Bruce Bohle, The Home Book of
American Quotations, 1967, New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, p. 5.
-
"The law requires a paper towel ad to be scrupulously honest, but allows political
candidates to lie without reproach. What's wrong with this picture?"
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin.
-
"Advertising is speech. It's regulated because it's often effective speech."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin.
-
"The law requires a paper towel ad to be scrupulously honest, but allows political
candidates to lie without reproach. What's wrong with this picture?"
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin.
[ Go Top ]
LIMITATIONS
-
"I've never found a client's business problem that could be solved solely through
advertising."
-
- - Lee Clow, president and chief creative officer of Chiat/Day, quoted in Karen
Stabiner,
Inventing Desire (1993), New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 129.
[ Go Top ]
LOGIC
-
"Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
- "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."
-
- - Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (1976), New York: Harper, p. 110.
- "The illogical man is what advertising is after. This is why advertising is
so anti-rational; this is why it aims at uprooting not only the rationality of
man but his common sense."
-
- - Henryk Skolimowski, "The Semantic Environment in the Age of Advertising,"
in Thomas H. Ohlbren and L. M. Berk, The New Languages: A Rhetorical
Approach to the Mass Media and Popular Culture (1977), Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, p. 95.
[ Go Top ]
MANIPULATION
-
"A fundamental truth about advertising is that advertising agency people
are not the ultimate decision-makers. As the advertising agency system
functions today, they are the puppets, the manipulated. Nor is the advertiser
as he sits astride the bleeding, panting agencyman the one who wields the whip
in full command. The final control, the decisive power, is in your hands
and under your command - if you will use it."
-
- - Samm Sinclair Baker, The Permissible Lie:
The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing
Company, p. 6.
-
"Anyone who thinks that people can be fooled or pushed around has an inaccurate and
pretty low estimate of people - and he won't do very well in advertising."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 86.
-
"Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness.
A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, quoted in John Robert Colombo, The Dictionary
of Canadian Quotations, 1991, Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd., p.
6.
- "Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has
taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised
products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same
field, the results have been disastrous."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 138.
-
"Advertising is criticized on the ground that it can manipulate consumers to
follow the will of the advertiser. The weight of evidence denies this ability.
Instead, evidence supports the position that advertising, to be successful, must
understand or anticipate basic human needs and wants and interpret available goods
and services in terms of their want-satisfying abilities. This is the very opposite
of manipulation."
-
- - Charles H. Sandage, "Some Institutional Aspects of Advertising," Journal
of
Advertising, 1972, vol. 1(1).
-
"Sixty percent of the newspaper space may be filled with advertising, but that
advertising does not command sixty percent of the average reader's attention.
We are inured to most of these advertisements and commercials; they wash over
us without even dampening the skin. We often do not stop to even read or watch
the ads at all, and when we do, they rarely penetrate or connect with our
consciousness,
let alone transform our identity. True, we are all persuaded and seduced from
time to time by these ads, encouraged to make irrational impulsive consumer choices.
But that kind of persuasion and seduction is endemic to social life; we run
across it constantly and develop mechanisms to filter it out and fend it off."
-
- - Rodney A. Smolla, "Information, Imagery, and the First Amendment: A Case for
Expansive Protection of Commercial Speech," 71 Texas Law Review 777 (1993),
p. 797.
-
Advertising "degrades the people it appeals to; it deprives them of their will
to choose."
-
- - C. P. Snow, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of
Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.
-
"Although advertising is communication unusually candid about its motivation, Americans
love to loathe it. As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes
seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of 'experts' become more annoying,
more people are tepted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us,' using,
among other dark arts, advertising."
-
- - George F. Will, syndicated columnist, "The Forbes Phenomenon: Should political
communication be rationed?" Austin American-Statesman, January 26, 1996,
p. A9.
[ Go Top ]
MEASUREMENT
-
"The Great Idea in advertising is far more than the sum of the recognition scores,
the ratings and all the other superficial indicators of its success; it is
in the realm of myth, to which measurements cannot apply."
-
- - Leo Bogart, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 113.
-
"As I see it, this is where we stand. We measure the sales effectiveness of
ads or commercials on their ability to attract attention and communicate,
or on their ability to affect attitudes, or on some combination of these and
we hope, and have some evidence to indicate, that we are really measuring the
sales effects of the advertising"
-
- - John S. Coulson, vice president of research for Leo Burnett Company, "Ads
Can Change Attitudes, Hike Sales; Effects Measurable," Marketing News,
February 16, 1976, p. 5.
[ Go Top ]
MEDIA
-
"Word of mouth is the best medium of all."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"The buying of time or space is not the taking out of a hunting license on
someone else's private preserve but is the renting of a stage on which we may
perform."
-
- - Howard Gossage, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 188.
-
"As long as media is mass - when the consumer had no choice, when it was networks
- you could fuck the consumer all day long with ring around the collar, because
she had to get up and turn off the set to avoid it. With cable and interactive sets,
with that remote control, you can't do that. It's got to be the polite invitation,
instead of the harangue."
-
- - Don Pepper, head of worldwide new business for Chiat/Day, quoted in Karen Stabiner,
Inventing Desire (1993), New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 92.
[ Go Top ]
MEDIA SUPPORT
-
"The fact must never be forgotten that no magazine publisher in the United States
could give what it is giving to the reader each month if it were not for the
revenue which the advertiser brings the magazine. It is the growth of advertising in
this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine
to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical
excellence. The American advertiser has made the superior American magazine of
today possible"
-
- - Edward Bok (1898), editor of Ladies' Home Journal,
quoted in John W. Wright, The Commercial Connection: Advertising & the
American Mass Media, 1979, New York: Dell Publishing Co., p. overleaf.
-
"In day-to-day commerce, television is not so much interested in the business of
communications as in the business of delivering audiences to advertisers.
People are the merchandise, not the shows. The shows are merely the bait."
-
- - Les Brown, Television: The Business Behind the Box, 1971, New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 15-16.
-
"A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising."
-
- - James Collins (1907), ad executive, quoted in Jackson Lears,
Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America,
1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 201.
-
"There have been many disputes by advertisers and their agencies about articles
published in magazines to which they took exception, and scheduled advertising has
been cancelled. But I can see no difference between this and the action of
an irate individual who cancels his subscription because of an article or story
that he doesn't like."
-
- - Fairfax Cone, of Foote Cone & Belding, quoted in Jackson Lears,
Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America,
1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 255.
-
"It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not
to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a
very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than
the humblest mechanic."
-
- - Alexander Hamilton (1803), founder of the New York Evening Post,
quoted in John W. Wright, The Commercial Connection: Advertising & the
American Mass Media, 1979, New York: Dell Publishing Co., p. overleaf.
-
"The role of the publisher . . . has changed from seller of a product to consumers,
to gatherer of consumer for advertisers . . . The role of the reader changes
from sovereign consumer to advertiser bait."
-
- - Vincent P. Norris, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the
World of
Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 377.
- "Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you
may suppose. . . . the vast majority of editors are incorruptible."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 137.
- "It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements
and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in
his eye."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 138.
-
"One Ad is worth more to a paper than forty Editorials."
-
- - Will Rogers (1924), comedian, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
-
"With no ads, who would pay for the media? The good fairy?"
-
- - Samuel Thurm, senior vice president of the Association of National
Advertisers,
quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 317.
[ Go Top ]
MORALITY & ETHICS
-
"Is advertising moral? It is part and parcel of the American free enterprise system .
. . . I challenge anybody to show any
[economic] system that has done as much for so many in so short a time."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 207.
-
"Ethics in advertising? Advertising is about as ethical as the American public.
About as ethical as you and your neighbors. About as selfish as you and your
acquaintances. It has about the same moral standards as the upper socioeconomic
strata of society because it is created, approved and paid for by the upper echelons
of modern U.S. society. I'll modify that to say that it is a little more ethical,
a little more moral, than the upper economic strata of society. Why? Because
advertising
lives in a fish bowl. It is the most visible of all commercial practices.
It has 200 million critics. And no business, no communications medium, no
art form (or whatever you want to call advertising), no other enterprise
has so many watchdogs."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 200-201.
-
"The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to
propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercized 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."
-
- - Dr. Samuel Johnson (1759), English author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The
Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"[A]dvertising is a non-moral force, like electricity, which not only illuminates
but electrocutes. Its worth to civilization depends upon how it is used."
-
- - J. Walter Thompson agency business pitch (1925), quoted in Jackson Lears,
Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America,
1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 224.
[ Go Top ]
PERVASIVE
- "The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 134.
-
"Advertising, whether or not it sells cars or chocolate, surrounds us and enters
into us, so that when we speak we may speak in or with reference to the language
of advertising and when we see we may see through schemata that advertising has
made salient for us . . . . [S]trictly as symbol, the power of advertising may
be considerable."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 210.
[ Go Top ]
POLITICAL
-
"Of course you sell candidates for political office the same way you sell soap
or sealing wax or whatever; because, when you get right down to it, that's the
only way anything is sold."
-
- - Sid Bernstein, advertising commentator, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want
Makers:
Inside the World of Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 291.
-
"Political commercials encourage the deceptive, the destructive and the degrading."
-
- - John O'Toole, Chairman of Foote Cone & Belding, quoted in Eric Clark,
The
Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 305.
-
"Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest
kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of
Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 305.
- "There is one category of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly
dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in Presidential elections."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 209.
[ Go Top ]
PRACTICE & PRACTITIONERS
-
"Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity
like the Chinese habit of foot-binding."
-
- - Dean Acheson, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 69.
-
"The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive
fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference."
-
- - Fred Allen, American comic
-
"To me, an advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
A vice-president in an advertising agency is a 'molehill man.' A molehill man
is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 A.M. and finds a molehill on
his desk. He has until 5 P.M. to make this molehill into a mountain."
-
- - Fred Allen, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 69.
-
"In advertising there is a saying that if you can keep your head while all those
around you are losing theirs - then you just don't understand the problem."
-
- - Hugh Malcolm Beville, Jr. (1954), director of research at NBC, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 82.
-
"When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come
up with a handful of mud either."
-
- - Leo Burnett (originated by John W. Crawford), quoted by Joan Kufrin, Leo
Burnett: Star Reacher(1995), Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, Inc., p.
52.
-
"Rarely have I seen any really great advertising created without a certain amount
of confusion, throw-aways, bent noses, irritation and downright cursedness."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 7.
-
"The work of an advertising agency is warmly and immediately human. It deals
with human needs, wants, dreams and hopes. Its 'product' cannot be turned out
on an assembly line."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 51.
-
"The advertising man is a liaison between the products of business and the mind
of the nation. He must know both before he can serve either."
-
- - Glenn Frank, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 13.
-
"You see, advertising is a substitute for a salesperson, so it should be likeable.
Who would buy from a salesperson who is rude, arrogant or insulting? People like
to do business with people they like, therefore they respond to advertising created
by people who like people."
-
- - Jerry Goodis, Canadian ad executive, quoted in John Robert Colombo, The Dictionary
of Canadian Quotations, 1991, Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd., p.
7.
- "We see advertising actually creating and naming taboos. The most famous,
B.O. and Halitosis, are archaeological specimens from an age which we might fix
as either Late Iron Tonic or Early Soap . . . . Bad breath and body odor have
always existed, of course, but as individual matters. To transfer them from
personal idiosyncrasies into tribal taboos is a magicianly trick indeed."
-
- - Howard Luck Gossage, "The Gilded Bough: Magic and Advertising," in Floyd W.
Matson and Ashley Montagu, The Human Dialogue: Perspectives on Communication (1967), New York: Free Press, p. 366.
-
"In American business today, with so many good companies offering bewilderingly
similar products, advertising has become perhaps the critical factor
in the consumer's decision of which one of those products to buy. The environment is
not so much one of innovation as it is one of marketing - which means the adman,
more than ever, has become its superstar."
-
- - Skip Hollandsworth
-
"It used to be that a fellow went on the police force when everything else failed,
but today he goes in the advertising game."
-
- - Frank McKinney Hubbard, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 14.
-
"Most fairly successful advertising men like to think that the composition of
their copy involves enormous esthetic skills and they have a tendency to excuse
the collecting of their exorbitant bribes on the ground that for the first time
in history true genius is, at last, finding adequate compensation."
-
- - Alexander King, quoted in A. K. Adams, The Home Book of Humorous Quotations,
1969, New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, p. 8.
-
"[The advertiser] is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic
court."
-
- - Joseph Wood Krutch, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
-
"Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge
of human nature, what dearly-bought experiences go into the making of an advertisement?
-
- - William J. Locke, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant
Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.
- "That gentleman will call the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think they're scared of him.
They're merely professional killers; he's in advertising!"
-
- - Robert Ludlum, in The Road to Gandolfino
- "The biggest problem which besets almost every agency is the problem of producing
good campaigns. Copywriters, art directors, and television producers are easily
come by, but the number of men who can preside over an agency's entire creative output
- perhaps a hundred new campaigns every year - can be numbered on the fingers of
one hand. These rare trumpeter swans must be capable of inspiring a motley crew
of writers and artists; they must be sure-footed judges of campaigns for a
wide range of different products; they must be good presenters; and they must
have a colossal appetite for midnight oil."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 41.
- "Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that
mine are new advertising campaigns."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 58.
- "The business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of
people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull.... our business
needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among
nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 15-16.
- "There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost
without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 76.
- "Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested
with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and
they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the
Metropolitan Opera."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 13.
- "Managing an advertising agency isn't all beer and skittles. After fourteen years
of it, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle
responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful
work."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 9.
-
"The number of agency people required to shoot a commercial on location is
in direct proportion to the mean temperature of the location."
-
- - Shelby Page, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 18.
-
"Men now say that they are in the advertising business with just as much pride
as the man who says, 'I am a professor at Yale,' or 'I am President of the United
States.'"
-
- - Printers' Ink, (October 29, 1902), vol. 41, p. 42.
-
"Advertising practitioners are interpreters. But unlike foreign language interpreters,
adpeople must constantly learn new languages. They must understand the language
of each new product, and speak the language of each new target audience."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin.
-
"One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds
provide."
-
- - Will Rogers, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political
Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 1.
-
"Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams - Joseph interpreting for Pharoah.
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.G. White (1936), U.S. author & editor, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 19.
- "In the ad game, the days are tough, the nights are long, and the work is emotionally
demanding. But it's worth it, because the rewards are shallow, transparent and meaningless."
-
- - Author Unknown
-
"Don't tell my mother I'm in advertising. She thinks I play piano in a whore
house."
-
- - Author unknown
[ Go Top ]
PROBLEM SOLVING
-
"When a client comes to us with a product, he is, in effect, giving us a problem
to be solved. . . . Some of the biggest advertising mistakes are people who
imagine they know what the problem is, or they're not even thinking about;
they're just coming up with that brilliant idea and trying to force the problem
to fit it."
-
- - Mary Wells Lawrence, Chairman of Wells, Rich, & Green, quoted in Vogue,
February 15, 1972.
[ Go Top ]
PRODUCT
-
"We think we will never know as much about a product as a client. After all,
he sleeps and breathes his product. He's built it. He's lived with it most
of his life. We couldn't possible know as much about it as he does. By the
same token, we firmly believe that he can't know as much about advertising.
Because we live and breathe that all day long."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 15.
-
"A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people
to know it's bad."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"We want consumers to say, 'That's a hell of a product' instead of, 'That's a
hell of an ad.'"
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 14.
-
"During the 36 years I have been in the agency business I have always been naively
guided by the principle that if we do not believe in the products we advertise strongly
enough to use them ourselves, or at least to give them a real try, we are not
completely honest with ourselves in advertising them to others . . . ."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted by Joan Kufrin, Leo Burnett: Star Reacher(1995),
Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, Inc., p. 126.
-
"There's no secret formula for advertising success, other than to learn everything
you can about the product. Most products have some unique characteristic,
and the really great advertising comes right out of the product and says something
about the product that no one else can say. Or at least no one else is
saying."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 172.
-
"It takes good clients to make a good advertising agency. Regardless of how
much talent an ad agency may have, it is ineffective without good products and
services to advertise."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 202.
-
"It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people
to survive."
-
- - Nicholas Johnson, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political
Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 2.
- "The product that will not sell without advertising will not sell profitably with
advertising."
-
- - Albert Lasker, head of Lord & Thomas advertising agency (later known
as Foote, Cone & Belding).
-
"What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself."
-
- - Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 19.
-
"Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due
to sacraments."
-
- - Thomas Merton (1968), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"The best ad is a good product."
-
- - Alan H. Meyer, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 18.
-
"Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living.
You've got to believe in the product."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 86.
-
"In writing advertising it must always be kept in mind that the customer
often knows more about the goods than the advertising writers because they have
had experience in buying them, and any seeming deception in a statement is
costly, not only in the expense of the advertising but in the detrimental effect
produced upon the customer, who believes she has been misled."
-
- - John Wanamaker
[ Go Top ]
PROFESSIONALISM
-
"Is advertising a profession, like law or medicine? How many new parents clutch
their baby to their breast and declare, 'I want this child to grow up to be
a media planner'?"
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin.
-
"The prevailing attitude appears to be that advertising is first and foremost a
business and that it should forget about trying to become a profession.
To this I must say that advertising will continue to have a weak public image
and fall short of meeting its social obligation until the field of practice is
built on a strong professional base and craftsmanship is recognized as a means
to an end, not an end in itself."
-
- - Charles H. Sandage, "Some Institutional Aspects of Advertising," Journal
of
Advertising, 1972, vol. 1(1).
[ Go Top ]
PUFFERY
-
"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and
it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises,
and by eloquences sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic."
-
- - Dr. Samuel Johnson, English author, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
-
"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."
-
- - Wyndham Lewis (1932), British author & painter, quoted in Robert Andrews, The
Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, p. 19.
-
"Who's kidding whom? What's the difference between Giant and Jumbo? Quart and
full quart? Two-ounce and big two-ounce? What does Extra Long
mean? What's a tall 24-inches? And what busy shopper can tell?"
-
- - Marya Mannes (1964), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
- "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 sme class
can be the best or the finest."
-
- - Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw
Company, p. 438.
- "Such exaggerations have been so common that the public takes them with a
grain of salt and partly excuses them as being due to the advertiser's license
of self-assertiveness. Nevertheless, the fact remains that superlative generalities
are weak arguments and far less convincing than a statement of facts. Much advertising
copy would be improved immensely by doing away with brag and substituting actual
facts about the merits of the article."
-
- - Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw
Company, p. 439.
[ Go Top ]
PURPOSE
-
"Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise . . . not ourselves. Our job is
to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job
is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are
smothering the product message."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"Our job is to bring the dead facts to life."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is
explaining the service which business renders."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 30.
-
"The advertising person's role on any side of the business is to help a company
understand its customers and their needs better; to help a company respond to
and speak to those needs, efficiently and effectively. Advertising is an honest
business, a noble business, the engine of the American economy."
-
- - Bob Lauterborn, "Ethics: Whose Responsibility?" Advertising Age, May
23, 1988, p. 16.
[ Go Top ]
RELIGION
-
"[Christ] would be a national advertiser today, I am sure, as He was a great
advertiser in His own day. He thought of His life as business."
-
- - Bruce Barton (1924), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 69.
[ Go Top ]
REPETITION
-
"Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern
in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself.
Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion.
They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle
of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of man, 1964,
New York: New American Library, Inc., p. 202.
- "The power of ads rests more in the repetition of obvious exhortations than in
the subtle transmission of values."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 5.
-
"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 London Times (1886), quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 17.
[ Go Top ]
RESEARCH
-
"There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at
one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"Asked about the power of advertising in research surveys, most agree that it
works, but not on them."
-
- - Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 13.
-
"The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest
your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well
in the marketplace."
-
- - David Ogilvy (1963), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore
decodes of enemy signals."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1983, New York: Crown
Publishers,
p. 158.
- "I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming
to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than
for illumination."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 87.
-
"At one of the largest advertising agencies in America psychologists on the
staff are probing sample humans in an attempt to find how to identify, and beam
messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness,
and so on."
-
- - Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 1957, New York: Pocket Books,
p. 2 - 3.
-
"Market research can establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that the egg is
a sad and sorry product and that it obviously will not continue to sell.
Because after all, eggs won't stand up by themselves, they roll too easily,
are too easily broken, require special packaging, look alike, are difficult to
open, won't stack on the shelf."
-
- - Robert Pliskin (1963), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70-71.
-
"Advertising research is one-half frustration, one-half exclamation point, and
one-half question-mark. If this adds up to more than 100 percent, it proves that
mathematics and research sometimes gives confusing results."
-
- - Michael P. Ryan, of Allied Chemical Corporation, quoted in Samm Sinclair
Baker,
The Permissible Lie:
The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing
Company, p. 144.
[ Go Top ]
RESPECT
-
"Millions of dollars' worth of advertising shows such little respect for the
reader's intelligence that it amounts almost to outright insult."
-
- - James Randolph Adams, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 12.
-
"If advertising had a little more respect for the public, the public would have
a lot more respect for advertising."
-
- - James Randolph Adams, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 12.
[ Go Top ]
RESPONSIBILITY
-
"Let's gear our advertising to sell goods, but let's recognize also that advertising
has a broad social responsibility."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 92.
-
"Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is great power that
has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility
of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater
work of the regeneration and redemption of mankind."
-
- - Calvin Coolidge (1926), quoted in Frank Presbrey, The History and Development
of Advertising, 1929, New York: Greenwood Press, p. 625.
-
"To explain responsibility to advertising men is like trying to convince an
eight-year-old that sexual intercourse is more fun than a chocolate ice cream cone."
-
- - Howard Luck Gossage, quoted in The Book of Gossage (1995), Chicago, IL:
The Copy Workshop, p. 29.
- "Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep
feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle."
-
- - Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell? (1964), New York: Lippincott, p. 31.
[ Go Top ]
SALES PROMOTION
- "The manufacturer who finds himself up the creek is the short-sighted opportunist who
siphons off all his advertising dollars for short-term promotions."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), New York: Vintage Books,
p. 169.
[ Go Top ]
SCIENCE
-
"Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a
science, but an art."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 63.
-
"There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they
talk the best game. They know all the rules . . . but there's one little rub.
They forget that advertising is persuasion, and persuasion is not a science,
but an art. Advertising is the art of persuasion."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (1984), New York:
Vintage Books, p. 257.
-
"I warn you against believing that advertising is a science."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"However much we would like advertising to be a science - because life would be
simpler that way - the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing
art, defying formularization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; where
what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the
next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"Advertisements may be evaluated scientifically; they cannot be created
scientifically."
-
- - Leo Bogart, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 110.
-
"The time has come when advertising in some hands has reached the status of
a science."
-
- - Claude C. Hopkins, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 61.
[ Go Top ]
SELLING
-
"The one essential, driving aim of the agency's campaign is not to please and
sell you, the public, but to sell the advertiser and get his initialed okay.
The public is a poor also-ran."
-
- - Samm Sinclair Baker, The Permissible Lie:
The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing
Company, p. 13.
-
"A good ad which is not run never produces sales."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 63.
- "[A] good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention
to itself."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 79.
-
"Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product,
but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they
stopped."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), New York: Vintage Books,
p. 171.
-
"Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything."
-
- - David Ogilvy (1984), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative."
-
- - David Ogilvy, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 18.
- "In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original
thinker unless you can also sell what you create."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 17.
-
"Yes, I sell people things they don't need. I can't, however, sell them something
they don't want. Even with advertising. Even if I were of a mind to."
-
- - John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York:
Chelsea House, p. 53.
-
"No, sir, I'm not saying that charming, witty and warm copy won't sell.
I'm just saying I've seen thousands of charming, witty campaigns that didn't sell."
-
- - Rosser Reeves, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 94.
-
"Let's say you have $1,000,000 tied up in your little company and suddenly your
advertising isn't working and sales are going down. And everything depends
on it. Your future depends on it, your family's future depends on it, other people's
families depend on it . . . Now, what do you want from me? Fine writing?
Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving
up?"
-
- - Rosser Reeves, quoted in Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising:
Conversations with Masters of the Craft (1990), Lincolnwood, IL: NTC
Business Books, p. 101.
-
"I think that I shall never see
An ad so lovely as a tree.
But if a tree you have to sell,
It takes an ad to do that well."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin, "Retort to Ogden Nash."
-
"Sales may lead to advertising as much as advertising leads to sales."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 29.
- "It is entirely plausible . . . that advertising helps sell goods even if it
never persuades a consumer of anything. So long as investers, salespeople, and
retailers believe advertising affects consumers, advertising will influence product
availability and this, by itself, shapes consumer choice. Availability, as
marketers sometimes say, equals sales. Advertising may be an important signal
system within the business world."
"Despite efforts at 'psychographics' which, here and there, have proved useful
guides for advertising, the most consistently used and efficient criteria for
describing consumers are the most psychologically blunt -- demographics ....
It is the most consistently employed kind of data in advertising work."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 63-64.
- "[C]hances are that neither the client nor the agency will ever know very much about
what role the ad has played in sales or profits of the client, either short-term or
long-term."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 85.
- "The advertising agencies and the media can argue the point either way.
If they are trying to convince an advertiser to increase the media budget,
they can cite examples of devastatingly successful advertising campaigns.
But if they are defending themselves before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
or a civic organization decrying television advertising to children, they trot
out the data that demonstrate that advertising has slight or no effect on product
sales."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 15-16.
-
"Don't confuse selling with art."
-
- - Jack Taylor, vice chairman of Jordan, McGrath, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 113.
[ Go Top ]
SEX
-
"Advertising didn't mix sex up with our daily lives. The great Marketeer in
the sky did that."
-
- - Barry Brooks, English creative director, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want
Makers:
Inside the World of Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 114.
-
"Sex! What is that but life, after all? We're all of us selling sex,
because we're all selling life."
-
- - Alvin Chereskin, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising."
-
- - John Lahr, U.S. literary and drama critic, quoted in Robert Andrews, The
Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, p. 19.
-
"In advertising, sex sells. But only if you're selling sex."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin.
-
"If we define pornography as any message from any communication medium that is
intended to arouse sexual excitement, then it is clear that most advertisements
are covertly pornographic."
-
- - Philip Slater, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant
Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 14.
[ Go Top ]
SOCIAL POWER
- "In the absence of traditional authority, advertising has become a kind of
social guide. It depicts us in all the myriad situations possible to a life
of free choice. It provides ideas about style, morality, behavior."
-
- - Ronald Berman, Advertising and Social Change (1981), Beverly Hills,
CA: Sage, p. 13.
-
"All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society.
We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it
onto a higher level."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in
the 20th century."
-
- - Daniel J. Boorstin
- "Sanely applied advertising could remake the world."
-
- - Stuart Chase
-
"Advertising is far from impotent or harmless; it is not a mere mirror image.
Its power is real, and on the brink of a great increase. Not the power to
brainwash overnight, but the power to create subtle and real change. The power
to prevail."
-
- - Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988,
New York: Penguin Books, p. 20.
- "Our society's values are being corrupted by advertising's insistence on the
equation: Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness."
-
- - John Fisher, The Plot to Make You Buy (1968), New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 117.
- "If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its
way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents
to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is
a social revoluation in our time!"
-
- - Jules Henry, Culture against Man (1963), New York: Random House, p. 76.
-
"Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than
any other single factor."
-
- - Clare Boothe Luce, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political
Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 1.
- "I don't think the advertisers have any real idea of their power not only to
reflect but to mold society."
-
- - Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell? (1964), New York: Lippincott, p. 32.
-
"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human
impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out
toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan (1964), Canadian communications theorist, quoted in Robert Andrews,
The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 19.
- "Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence
them."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books,
p. 26.
- "The schools, government, and news media are all more powerful in shaping people's
basic concepts of how the world operates and what kinds of lives are worth living.
Still, advertising is a powerful cultural institution in this country (less
so in other capitalist countries, though its presence is growing)."
-
- - Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact
on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. xix.
-
"If advertising was that powerful, then people would believe there's talking fruit
in their underwear."
-
- - Dick Sittig, creative group head at Chiat/Day, quoted in Karen Stabiner,
Inventing Desire (1993), New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 57.
[ Go Top ]
STRATEGY
-
"Plan the sale when you plan the ad."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 16.
-
"Techniques of art, layout, typography, radio and television productions and
fine writing are important. Nevertheless, they are secondary to the
basic selling proposition around which the ad or commercial is built. It is
not the purpose of the ad or commercial to make the reader or listener say
'My, what a clever ad.' It is the purpose of advertising to make the reader or
listener say, 'I believe I'll buy one when I'm shopping tomorrow,' or 'I wonder
if Joe could get one for me wholesale? The place to start in advertising is
the basic selling appeal. An appeal that fulfills some existing need in the
prospect's mind, an appeal that can be readily understood and believed."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 206.
-
"Creative without strategy is called 'art.' Creative with
strategy is called 'advertising.'"
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1995), advertising professor, The University of Texas at
Austin.
-
"Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the
Catskills."
-
- - Al Ries and Jack Trout (1986), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public
Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 71.
[ Go Top ]
STEREOTYPING
-
"An 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. Any expensive ad is as carefully built on the tested foundations of
public stereotypes or 'sets' of established attitudes, as any skyscraper is
built on bedrock."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of man, 1964,
New York: New American Library, Inc., p. 203.
[ Go Top ]
STYLE
-
"Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"With our industry being watched so carefully by governmental agencies, with
the FTC ready to pounce on every claim we make, what we CAN say in our ads is
forever narrowing and the sharpest tool left for us is HOW we say it."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out
good. But the energetic displaces the passive."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you
make."
-
- - William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham
Worldwide.
-
"A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted,
it also must afflict the comfortable."
-
- - Bernice Fitz-Gibbon, quoted in Elyse & Mike Sommer,
Similis Dictionary, 1988, Detroit, MI: Gale Researh Company, p. 12.
- "There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements.
If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per
cent more readers."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 108.
[ Go Top ]
SUBLIMINAL
-
"Subliminal advertising does not affect consumer buying behavior, advertising recall,
or any other marketplace behavior."
-
- - Jack Haberstroh, Ice Cube Sex: The Truth About Subliminal
Advertising,
1994, Notre Dame, IN: Cross Cultural Publications, p. 55.
- "Subliminal perception is a subject that virtually no one wants to believe exists,
and - if it does exist - they much less believe that it has any practical application
. . . . The techniques are in widespread use by media, advertising and public
relations agencies, industrial and commercial corporations, and by the Federal
government itself."
-
- - Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction:
Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974, New York: Signet
(New American Library), p. 1.
- "Merchandisers, by embedding subliminal trigger devices in media, are
able to evoke a strong emotional relationship between, say, a product perceived in
an advertisement weeks before and the strongest of all emotional stimuli
- love (sex) and death."
-
- - Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction:
Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974, New York: Signet
(New American Library), p. 28.
- "Ice cubes likely sell more alcohol for the distilling industry than attractive models
in cheesecake poses. The inconspicuous ice cubes often hide the invisible sell
- invisible, that is, to the conscious mind."
-
- - Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction:
Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974, New York: Signet
(New American Library), p. 95.
- "Most national advertising includes embedding [of hidden stimuli]. Retail
or local ad layouts may not have the facilities, as their artists and writers
either do not know about subliminal techniques or they lack the skill and
craftsmanship required to do the work well. Every major advertising agency
has at least one embedding technician in its art department. The technique is
taught in most commercial art schools."
-
- - Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction:
Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974, New York: Signet
(New American Library), p. 108.
-
"[A]ds are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men-of-the-mind for
semiconscious exposure."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of man, 1964,
New York: New American Library, Inc., p. 203.
-
"[A]ny ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious
consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills
for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on
sociologists."
-
- - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of man, 1964,
New York: New American Library, Inc., p. 202-03.
-
"In the field of marketing . . . the trend toward selling [has] reached something
of a nadir with the unveiling . . . of so-called subliminal projection.
That is the technique designed to flash messages past our conscious guard."
-
- - Vance Packard (1958), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second."
-
- - Steven Wright
[ Go Top ]
TARGETING
-
"There is no such thing as a Mass Mind. The Mass Audience is made up of individuals,
and good advertising is written always from one person to another. When it
is aimed at millions it rarely moves anyone."
-
- - Fairfax Cone, of Foote Cone & Belding, quoted in John O'Toole, The
Trouble
with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York:
Chelsea House, p. 48.
-
"You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem?
We're the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X."
-
- - Dick Gregory (1962), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library:
Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press,
p. 70.
-
"There is no such thing as national advertising. All advertising is local and
personal. It's one man or woman reading one newspaper in the kitchen or watching
TV in the den."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 204.
[ Go Top ]
TASTE
-
"The Soviet Union, which has complained recently about alleged anti-Soviet
themes in American advertising, lodged an official protest this week against
the Ford Motor Company's new campaign: 'Hey you stinking fat Russian, get
off my Ford Escort.'"
-
- - Dennis Miller, Saturday Night Live
-
"The aggregate effect of advertising is to bring about wide sharing of tastes.
The actual social function of advertising is not to mold taste in any
particular way, nor to debase it . . . . It does not matter what people want
to buy as long as they want to buy enough of the same thing to make mass production
possible. Advertising helps to unify taste, to de-individualize it and thus
to make mass production possible."
-
- - Ernest Van Den Haag, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant
Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.
[ Go Top ]
TECHNOLOGY
-
"For marketers . . . the mass media are no longer the sole choice. Traditional media
retain an important advantage: the 'rub-off' credibility that accrues from being
part of a broadcast or publication invited into the home. But for many marketers,
media advertising is a shotgun. The new technologies provide rifles, which can
target prime prospects."
-
- - Stanley E. Cohen, "The Dangers of Today's Media Revolution," Advertising
Age,
September 30, 1991, p. 18.
-
"Advertising is on its deathbed and it will not survive long, having contracted a
fatal case of new technology."
-
- - Roland T. Rust and Richard W. Oliver, "The Death of Advertising," Journal
of Advertising, 1994, 23(4): 71-77, p. 76.
[ Go Top ]
UGLY
-
"When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable
to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded."
-
- - Pat Brown, former Governor of California, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy
on Advertising (1985), New York: Vintage Books, p. 213-214.
[ Go Top ]
VALUE
-
"No company that markets products or services to the consumer can remain a
leader in its field without a deep-seated commitment to advertising."
-
- - Edwin L. Artzt, CEO of Proctor & Gamble, "Grooming the Next Generation of
Management," A.N.A./The Advertiser, Spring 1992, p. 69.
-
"If everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or
even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts?
By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them
seem of a higher level."
-
- - Jean Baudrillard (1986), French semiologist, quoted in Robert Andrews, The
Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what
is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are."
-
- - Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
-
"There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary."
-
- - Brendan Behan, quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry
& Whiteside Limited, p. 17.
-
"Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know
what you are doing, but nobody else does."
-
- - Steuart Henderson Britt, advertising consultant, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus
of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.
- "The business that considers itself immune to the necessity for advertising sooner or
later finds itself immune to business."
-
- - Derby Brown, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 13.
-
"Whether or not the standard of living made possible by mass production and
in turn by mass circulation, is supported by and filled with the work of us
hucksters, I guess is something that only history can decide."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted by Joan Kufrin, Leo Burnett: Star Reacher(1995),
Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, Inc., p. 143.
- "You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements."
-
- - Norman Douglas (1917), British author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Routledge Dictionary of
Quotations 1987, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 5.
-
"Early to bed,
Early to rise;
Never get tight,
And advertise."
-
- - Timothy Eaton, quoted in John Robert Colombo, The Dictionary
of Canadian Quotations, 1991, Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd., p.
6.
-
"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."
-
- - F. Scott Fitzgerald, U.S. author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"You must stir it and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or trust me, you haven't a chance."
-
- - W. S. Gilbert, quoted in Margaret Miner and Hugh Rawson, The New
International Dictionary of Quotations, 1986, New York: Penguin Books, p. 288.
-
"It has taken more than a hundred scientists two years to find out how to make
the product in question; I have been given thirty days to create its personality and
plan its launching. If I do my job well, I shall contribute as much as the
hundred scientists to the success of this product."
-
- - David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, New York: Ballantine
Books, p. 69.
-
"If commerce is the engine of our economy, then advertising is the spark.
Responsible advertisers are the drivers who keep us on the right track, leading
to a richer, more benevolent society."
-
- - Brian Philcox, quoted in John Robert Colombo, The Dictionary
of Canadian Quotations, 1991, Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd., p.
7.
-
"To advertise when trade is dull
Is useless, don't you see?
I advertise each day, and trade
Is never dull with me."
-
- - Printers' Ink, (January 9, 1895), vol. 12, p. 44.
- "Advertising is totally unnecessary. Unless you hope to make money."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (2000), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
- "If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go
into the advertising business in preference to almost any other . . . . The general
raising of the standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the
past half century would have been impossible without the spreading of the knowledge of
higher standards by means of advertising."
-
- - Franklin Roosevelt, former U.S. President, quoted in David Ogilvy, Confessions
of an Advertising Man (1978), New York: Ballantine Books,
p. 132.
- "Advertising, however tasteless and excessive it may seem, is nonetheless dissemination
of information as to who is producing and selling what product, for what reason,
and at what price."
-
- - U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council,
425 U.S. 748 (1976), p. 765.
-
"The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To tell you when she's done.
And so we scorn the codfish,
While the humble hen we prize.
Which only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise."
-
- - Author unknown, quoted in Bruce Bohle, The Home Book of
American Quotations, 1967, New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, p. 5.
-
"he who has a product to sell
and goes and whispers in a well
is not so apt to get the dollars
as one who climbs up a tree and hollers"
-
- - Author unknown
[ Go Top ]
WANTS
-
"We read advertisements . . . to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always
ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what
we have all along wanted without really knowing it."
-
- - Daniel J. Boorstin (1961), U.S. historian, quoted in Robert Andrews, The
Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
-
"Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public
mind with desires and belief."
-
- - Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company,
p. 54.
-
"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."
-
- - William Feather, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant
Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.
-
"Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell
them what they wanted."
-
- - John Kenneth Galbraith, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political
Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 1.
-
"It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or
houses to the homeless."
-
- - John Kenneth Galbraith, American economist, quoted in
Julia Vitullo-Martin and J. Robert Moskin, The Executives Book of Quotations,
1994, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 5.
- "Advertising as the printed form of selling would seem . . . ultimately to
be justified in so far as it serves as a means of increasing legitimate human
wants, as an agency of fair and economic competition in the distribution of
goods, and as a stimulant to social progress."
-
- - Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw
Company, p. 115.
- "The business of the advertiser or the seller is not to create fundamentally new
desires. That is not necessary and really cannot be done. Man already has
certain desires present from birth, which are a part of his fundamental make-up.
All that a seller can do is to direct these desires in certain directions, or
stimulate them to action, or show by what new ways an old desire may be satisfied."
-
- - Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw
Company, p. 255.
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WASTE
-
"Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find
outside an advertising agency."
-
- - Raymond Chandler
-
"There is more money wasted in advertising by underspending than by overspending.
Years ago someone said that underspending in advertising is like buying a
ticket halfway to Europe. You've spent your money but you never get there."
-
- - Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad
Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 204-205.
- "Two common conceptions with regard to advertising which are held by a considerable
number of people are that enormously large sums of money are expended for it,
and that much of this expenditure is an economic waste."
-
- - Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising, 1923, Chicago, IL: A.W. Shaw
Company, p. 38.
-
"I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out
which half"
-
- - John Wanamaker, as quoted in Martin Mayer, Whatever
Happened to Madison Avenue? (1991), Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, p. 138.
Apparently, this was originally attributed to Viscount Leverhulme (William Hesketh Lever),quoted
in Tony Augarde, Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, 1991, New York:
Oxford University Press, p. 136.
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WEAKNESSES
-
"The most common trouble with advertising is that it tries too hard to impress people."
-
- - James Randolph Adams, quoted in John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels &
Thomas C. Jones, The International Dictionary of Thoughts, 1969,
Chicago, IL: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Co., p. 12.
-
"The faults of advertising are only those common to all human institutions.
If advertising speaks to a thousand in order to influence one, so does the church.
And if it encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony.
Good times, bad times, there will always be advertising. In good times, people
want to advertise; in bad times they have to."
-
- - Bruce Barton (1955), chairman of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary
Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 81.
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WEAROUT
-
"Unless a product becomes outmoded, a great campaign will not wear itself out."
-
- - Rosser Reeves, quoted in Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon:
An Advertising Story (1994), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 61.
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- OTHER
-
Describing top fashion editors: "Just advertising departments with legs and
high heels."
-
- - Richard Avedon (1992), photographer, quoted in
Julia Vitullo-Martin and J. Robert Moskin, The Executives Book of Quotations,
1994, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 5.
- "There's so much truly putrid advertising out there it's embarrassing. But not all advertising is bad. Some of it is really quite mediocre."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (2000), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
- "While it may be true that the best advertising is word-of-mouth, never lose sight of the fact it also can be the worst advertising."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (2000), Chairman of The University of Texas Advertising Department.
- "The Internet holds immense potential as a marketing tool. As an interactive medium that reaches around the world, it promises an interpersonalization of advertising. As mass communication becomes mass-interpersonal communication, marketing efforts become more efficient, effective, and extensive."
-
- - Jef I. Richards, "Legal Potholes on the Information Superhighway," Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 1997, 16(2): 319-326.
- "Internet advertising will not replace traditional media, it will compliment them."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1997), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
- "Clickthrough is a poor measurement of banner ad effectiveness, especially for low involvement products. It is foolhardy to think of Web ads solely as a device to move visitors to the advertisers' Web sites. For many products, the Web ad should be designed to communicate a selling message in a manner akin to print media."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1997), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
- "A whore at a PTA meeting probably doesn't spend much time bragging about her professional achievements. I would imagine the same holds true for spammers."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (2004), professor of Advertising at the University of Texas at Austin.
- "Congress seems to believe that 'Children are our future' is a phrase coined by tobacco advertisers."
-
- - Jef I. Richards (1997), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
- "In the world of commercial speech, tobacco advertising bears the earmarks
of an endangered species."
-
- - Jef Richards, "Politicizing Cigarette Advertising," Catholic University
Law Review, 1996, vol. 45 (4), p. 1147.
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Published - August 2007
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