Best quotes on publicity and advertising, aphorisms, ideas and wise thoughts by great and famous writers, artists, authors, actors, journalists and witty people.
Only a few can freely enrich themselves on the free market, for the multitude free competition only means the freedom to end up in poverty.
Carl William Brown
All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.
Brendan F. Behan
This website is proudly free of ads, listings, cookies and other propaganda, so you can visit it without any hassle or worry.
Carl William Brown
A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.
Henry Ford
Google never did any advertising. They’re like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.
Paul Graham
Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock
Google, thanks to its intelligent algorithms, claims to control the improper use of advertising, but at the same time it is perhaps still very far from limiting the chaotic stupidity of the world.
Carl William Brown
The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.
Tom Robbins
Hyperbole, exaggeration, idiocy, falsehood, banality, stupidity, all this constitutes the language of advertising.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
Bill Bernbach
Every age has its own crazy laws that govern society; nowadays one of these is the law of the market.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.
Anonymous
The main purpose of advertising is to develop from an early age the faith that leads to accepting the authority of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is legalized lying.
Herbert George Wells
There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
Brendan F. Behan
If iteration is the basis of poetic discourse, then advertising is certainly the poetry of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
The price of justice is eternal publicity.
Arnold Bennett
Publicity is the life of this culture. Without publicity capitalism could not survive and at the same time publicity is its dream.
John Berger
The monster of advertisement… is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out to right and left, in front and behind, its clammy arms, and gathers in, through its thousand little suckers, all the gossip and slander and praise afloat, to spit out again at the public.
Sarah Bernhardt
The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the “genius” of the personage, the greater the profit.
George Grosz
War graveyards. The dead in war are nothing but advertisements to enrich the funereal marketing of world stupidity.
Carl William Brown
With publicity comes humiliation.
Tama Janowitz
Advertising makes products cost twice their intrinsic value and then allows a bunch of imbeciles to split the profit.
Carl William Brown
Of course I’m a publicity hound. Aren’t all crusaders? How can you accomplish anything unless people know what you are trying to do?
Vivien Kellems
To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one’s tail.
Thomas E. Lawrence
Religion and advertising are the souls of commerce, only that in religion at least something good is there.
Carl William Brown
What kills the skunk is the publicity it gives itself.
Abraham Lincoln
We endeavor more that men should speak of us, than how and what they speak, and it sufficeth us that our name run in men’s mouths, in what manner soever. It stemma that to be known is in some sort to have life and continuance in other men’s keeping.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
If you want an audience start a fight.
Irish Proverb
Since television programs have become so stupid and insipid, advertising has also made great strides.
Carl William Brown
I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people.
William Shakespeare
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.
Gore Vidal
Advertising may be the soul of commerce, but when it’s on I change the channel, immediately.
Carl William Brown
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
David Foster Wallace
Advertising is a sign of current events, its signifier is attractive, its meaning is devastating. Advertising is a sign, it is a sign of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
It is not true that advertising is the soul of commerce; weapons, for example, are not advertised anywhere, yet they sell very well.
Carl William Brown
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
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
But do you know that certain philosophers of language, certain semiologists, who pose as committed intellectuals, criticize advertising and the world of hidden persuaders so much and then earn hundreds of millions working for famous advertising agencies.
Carl William Brown
Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?
Donald Barthelme
Advertising is salesmanship-in-print.
Claude C. Hopkins
Let’s not forget that behind the artificial intelligence of the big companies that profit from advertising, there is always the humanoid imbecility of their managers and shareholders.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is usually loyal and low key. It does not complain or ask for pay raises. It does the job of letting people know that you exist and solicits a response in a very low key and unassuming way.
Ali Pervez
That is the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts.
Samuel Goldwyn
Judicious advertising is the corner stone of success.
Byron W. Orr
Google’s algorithms and artificial intelligence allow them to have control over their advertising circuits, and increasingly also over the people who use them.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is not fraud; people are not fools. Advertising is light, and knowledge and education.
N. W. Ayer
Advertising is judged not by what it says, but by what the consumer thinks it says.
Kenneth Roman, Jane Maas & Martin Nisenholtz
Social media and advertising are great for probing and studying the nefarious stupidity of the global market of humanity.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is not a rifle; it is a shotgun, and any campaign featuring outdoor boards of a cartoon animal inevitably will catch children in its spray.
Bob Garfield
The only business that is worth advertising is the business that would succeed without advertising.
N. W. Ayer
Of course the world is increasingly full of idiocies, think that some companies first pollute and destroy nature, then to advertise themselves they finance the WWF and the environmental league.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is the fuel of enterprise.
George French
The base of advertising is the mob movement… to make a mass of people move in a certain direction.
Thomas E. Dockrell
Although contemporary advertising is relatively young, it already has a considerable tradition. Each new ad is encountered against a background of thousands of earlier ads.
Guy W. D. Cook
Advertising is prima facie evidence that the man who pays believes that advertising is good. It has brought great results to others, it must be good for him. So he takes it like some secret tonic which others have endorsed. If the business thrives, the tonic gets the credit. Otherwise, the failure is due to fate.
Claude C. Hopkins
The world is always improving, for example, once rich patrons paid artists to help them in their work; today the rich help advertising.
Carl William Brown
I find that I am growing in the advertising business in proportion as I realize and expound the theory and practice that there is no such thing as advertising.
Thomas E. Dockrell
Advertising is utterly unprofitable, and I could prove it to you in one week. End an ad with an offer to pay five dollars to anyone who writes you that he read the ad through. The scarcity of replies will amaze you.
Claude C. Hopkins
Good advertising is advertising that gets the money.
Julius Schneider
Advertising is a highly visible form of public culture, as conspicuous in its absence–as when advertising is removed from a metro station or a sporting event venue temporarily – as it is in its apparent ever-presence. Without advertising, space is refigured and opens up a glimpse of what feels like a quite different society.
Iain Macrury
Just as I am not interested in television advertising, but I watch it, so I do the same with Internet ads, I am not interested in them, but I click on them, so someone makes money, and I get what I donated.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is the principal reason why the business person has come to inherit the earth.
James R. Adams
Advertising is an impersonal projection of the personal salesman.
H. S. Snyder
Advertising is a business within a business and the man who neglects it will soon find himself with a business without a business.
Frank Farrington
Advertising is image management.
Thomas John Reynolds & Jerry Corrie Olson
Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.
Marshall Mcluhan
Advertising is the through express train of modern publicity. It is by this medium that all good things, all things worthwile, are accomplished. From sunrise to sunrise, through the daily press, a new product is introduced, a new thought created and the complexion of a nation changed.
Sam Dobbs
What we used to call advertising is evolving into something far more personal and ubiquitous. You may not like it, but you’d better be ready for it.
Chuck Porter
What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.
David Ogilvy
Advertising is the principal reason why the business person has come to inherit the earth.
James R. Adams
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
Ted Turner
In the long term, I think I could see us doing advertising where that advertising is entertaining and where people don’t regret seeing it, which unfortunately is not the case with most advertising.
Elon Musk
The future of advertising and marketing services belongs as much to Maths Men (and women) as it does to Mad Men.
Martin Sorrell
The fair value of a product should be determined by the market, that is, by supply and demand; but what happens if the market is stupid, corrupt, vain and shamelessly polluted.
Carl William Brown
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
Franz Kafka
Advertising is an expected part of everyday life, but it is also alien to it: the ever-expected but uninvited guest; on magazine pages, during TV programmes, and round each city corner.
Iain Macrury
Modern education represents the dominant culture, the pedagogy of the spot to spread the winning philosophy of advertising.
Carl William Brown
We read advertisements to discover and enlarge our desires.
Daniel J. Boorstin
It’s 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
The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
Bill Cosby
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas
Advertising is very useful, in fact when I see an advertisement for a product, I know I must not buy it.
Carl William Brown
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain
Much brass has been sounded and many cymbals tinkled in the name of advertising; but the advertisements which persuade people to act are written by men who have an abiding respect for the intelligence of their readers, and a deep sincerity regarding the merits of the goods they have to sell.
Bruce Fairchild Barton
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.
George Orwell
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
Marshall Mcluhan
In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.
Gore Vidal
I wonder why they never advertise excrement, but pooping is good for you.
Carl William Brown
The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. But that’s the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that.
Noam Chomsky
Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn’t meant.
Brenda Ueland
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
Fred Allen
Advertising is an impersonal projection of the personal salesman.
H. S. Snyder
Advertising is usually loyal and low key. It does not complain or ask for pay raises. It does the job of letting people know that you exist and solicits a response in a very low key and unassuming way.
Ali Pervez
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
Theodor W. Adorno
That is the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts.
Samuel Goldwyn
Advertising is judged not by what it says, but by what the consumer thinks it says.
Kenneth Roman, Jane Maas & Martin Nisenholtz
As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world.
Bruce Barton
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
John Lahr
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
Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.
Marshall Mcluhan
Google never did any advertising. They’re like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.
Paul Graham
Advertising is not fraud; people are not fools. Advertising is light, and knowledge and education.
N. W. Ayer
The advertisements in a newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
Henry Ward Beecher
Advertising is immodesty turned to profit.
Abraham Miller
Advertising is the way great brands get to be great brands.
Al Ries & Laura Ries
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
The rules of the free market allow one to enrich oneself freely and therefore preclude the way for any rule.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is a valuable factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Sinclair Lewis
No method of advertising is too expensive if it brings proper results.
S. Roland Hall
Advertising is image management.
Thomas John Reynolds & Jerry Corrie Olson
The church prays for us, industrialists produce for us, the mass media inform and entertain us, advertising stimulates us, politicians administer us, banks preserve our savings, law enforcement protects us, schools educate us… and then we complain!
Carl William Brown
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
Marshall Mcluhan
Advertising is like oxygen, you can’t survive without it.
Donald E. Hults
Enlightened capitalists first reduce you to poverty and then, thanks to advertising, invite you to consume more and more.
Carl William Brown
The only people who care about advertising are the people who work in advertising.
George Parker
In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
William Bernbach
Advertising certainly increases crime, therefore it is certainly criminal, execute them!
Carl William Brown
In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.
Gore Vidal
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain
Advertising is even more powerful than cinema. It could be a revolutionary medium of cultural change.
Delshad Irani
Advertising is a valuable factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Sinclair Lewis
It’s 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
Since the world is so keen on worshipping its imbecility and propagating its stupidity, I don’t see why those who try to fight it shouldn’t advertise themselves a little to achieve at least a minimum of popularity.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is an expected part of everyday life, but it is also alien to it: the ever-expected but uninvited guest; on magazine pages, during TV programmes, and round each city corner.
Iain Macrury
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
Marshall Mcluhan
Advertising is a symphony of messages, it is a world of dreams, it is the art of communication; yes, it is the art of transmitting nonsense.
Carl William Brown
The man who stops advertising to save money is the man who stops the clock to save time.
Anonymous
Advertising is at least 3,000 years old. In 1200 B.C., the Phoenicians painted messages on stones near paths where people often walked.
Shirley Biagi
Either advertising wants to make people stupid, or it already considers them stupid, otherwise it would not be so stupid.
Carl William Brown
Advertising is an addiction: Once you’re hooked, it’s very difficult to stop. You become accustomed to putting a fixed advertising cost into your budget, and you are afraid to stop because of a baseless fear that, if you do, your flow of new customers will dry up and your previous investments in advertising will have been wasted.
Michael Phillips & Salli Rasberry
Advertising is salesmanship-in-print.
Claude C. Hopkins
I had never thought of advertising as a life work, though I had on the side, written some very successful copy.
Bruce Fairchild Barton
Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity, like the Chinese habit of foot-binding.
Dean Acheson
By now, shopping tips have even reached school books, so I too will need some advertising, and what better for a book that incites revolt than a nice sponsorship of an arms factory.
Carl William Brown
The weakest link in any advertising program is its credibility. An advertising message has little believability with the average person. Advertising is taken for what it is – a biased message paid for by a company with a selfish interest in what the consumer consumes.
Al Ries & Laura Ries
Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising, and they wouldn’t have to advertise it.
Will Rogers
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
George Orwell
The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.
David Ogilvy
Advertising is a symphony of messages, it is a world of dreams, it is the art of communication, yes, it is the art of transmitting nonsense.
Carl William Brown
When advertising is great advertising, it fastens on the myths, signs, and symbols of our common experience and becomes, quite literally, a benefit of the product…. As a result of great advertising, food tastes better, clothes feel snugger, cars ride smoother. The stuff of semiotics becomes the magic of advertising.
Curt Suplee
The free market system thanks to enlightened capitalists reduces you to misery, while the consumerist system thanks to its illusory advertising invites you to spend more and more.
Carl William Brown
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock
Many nations of consumers talk and live like ads. Advertising is not just a mirror but also a perceptioncreator. It makes and moulds generations of attitudes.
Harish Bijoor
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
John Lahr
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 the advertising men who create it?
David Riesman
Unfortunately, in the coming years, advertising can only improve, in fact it could hardly become more stupid than it is; those in the sector, however, do not despair. Spes Ultima Dea
Carl William Brown
The ad is a meeting place of all the arts and all the skills and all the media of the American environment.
Marshall Mcluhan
Advertising is immodesty turned to profit.
Abraham Miller
The poor, through the license fee or advertising, pay for television to watch the rich having fun.
Carl William Brown
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
Ted Turner
As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world.
Bruce Barton
Advertising is no longer preoccupied with the staging of the commodity. Instead advertising is the prefiguration of the commodity’s empty form.
Pamela Odih
Judicious advertising is the corner stone of success.
Byron W. Orr
Advertising is not a rifle; it is a shotgun, and any campaign featuring outdoor boards of a cartoon animal inevitably will catch children in its spray.
Bob Garfield
The ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort to sell something by yelling in print.
Samuel Hopkins Adams
Advertising is the way great brands get to be great brands.
Al Ries & Laura Ries
We read advertisements to discover and enlarge our desires.
Daniel J. Boorstin
The advertisements in a newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
Henry Ward Beecher
The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
Bill Cosby
Advertising is like oxygen, you can’t survive without it.
Donald E. Hults
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
Marshall Mcluhan
Advertising is the fuel of enterprise.
George French
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
Advertising is fundamentally broken – the Internet screwed it up and the only rational response is for people to use ad-blockers and tune out all the crappy ads.
Joe Marchese
Advertising – A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Northrop Frye
Advertising is the garment of abundance … a Masque-like “put on” of all the motifs and actions of our time.
Marshall Mcluhan
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas
On the same topic you can also read:
Quotes on publicity by C.W. Brown
Universal Marketing Dictionary
