Wise reflections on publicity, ideas, thoughts and critical opinions about the world of advertising and publicity in general both on TV and on Internet networks and new platforms.
The consumer’s desires are manufactured by the producer. Despite the competition between various brands, advertising has a general aim, and that is to stimulate the desire for consumption; all companies help each other in exercising this fundamental influence through their respective advertising, while the buyer exercises only secondarily the dubious privilege of choosing between various competing brands.
Erich Fromm
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
Good, careful advertising of the steady, never-let-up sort will positively win. It isn’t the fisherman who goes thrashing along and fishes the whole length of a stream in an afternoon that gets the fish. It’s the quiet chap who finds a likely looking hole and camps out right by it until he gets his fish and then tries another in the same careful way. More than that, this careful fisherman does not get discouraged because Mr. Fish fails to snap up the hook at the first cast. He tries the bait and he tries the flies, and he changes his lure and his point of view until he hits it right. If the business doesn’t respond to the advertising, change the advertising. Don’t lay it up to the public that your bait doesn’t tempt them.
Frank Farrington
Just as I am not interested in television advertising, but I watch it, because sometimes it is also funny and then it helps us understand how the world turns, so I do the same with Internet ads, maybe they concern products or offers that do not really interest me, but sometimes I click on them anyway, partly out of curiosity, and partly to stay informed both on the structures of new websites, and to visit new promotions, which can be commercial, tourist, industrial, educational and so on; what’s more, by doing so someone also earns money, furthermore I stay better informed on the stupidity of the globe and on advertising networks, and in the end I also receive a little of what I have donated.
Carl William Brown
In contemporary society, advertising is everywhere. We cannot walk down the street, shop, watch television, go through our mail, log on to the Internet, read a newspaper or take a train without encountering it. Whether we are alone, with our friends or family, or in a crowd, advertising is always with us, if only on the label of something we are using.
Guy W. D. Cook
I gave someone a perverse argument not so long ago about why advertising is better than movies. You want to hear it? Movies operate from a really disingenuous premise, that people are heroes. I know a lot of people and have had an opportunity over the years to observe them. Are they heroes…? Let’s put it this way. Advertising tries something simpler and more believable: Products as heroes. I guess the idea is: When all else fails, put your faith in conditioner.
Errol Morris
At school I have always advertised books, writers and culture, but in addition to my salary as a precarious teacher with a split chair and in an uncomfortable location I have never taken 5 pennies from anyone; then, while I am enjoying the tranquility of the domestic hearth and I relax in front of the magic screen I see with pleasure, as well as with philanthropic and sincere satisfaction, splendid people who earn hundreds and hundreds of dollars to advertise a myriad of useless, harmful and stupid products. Oh yes, that’s the way the world goes on.
Carl William Brown
Advertisers like to tell parents that they can always turn off the TV to protect their kids from any of the negative impact of advertising. This is like telling us that we can protect our children from air pollution by making sure they never breathe. Advertising is our environment. We swim in it as fish swim in water. We cannot escape it. Unless, of course, we keep our children home from school and blindfold them whenever they are outside of the house. And never let them play with other children. Even then, advertising’s messages are inside our intimate relationships, our homes, our hearts, our heads.
Jean Kilbourne
Ah yes – my old friend the ad agency – you haven’t changed a bit. Advertising is still an industry where a few people who regard themselves as enlightened progressives wear their ideology as a free pass. Creatives painstakingly injecting a positive black image into their ads to satisfy diversity, all the while marginalizing that very image that works right beside them. They routinely exchange remarks that would be classified as subtext racism if they hadn’t come from guys sporting Apple watches and $300 shoes. Marveling at their clever use of prose in an email that spews the same unambiguous racism of the red necks in the fly over states they so frequently love to decry.
Kim Wright
That’s what advertisers do. They bet their lives on criticism, on attention, on desire, fear, love, the marriage of licensing rights and the market. On the persistence of the image in the public’s memory. On brand loyalty. On customer empathy. On sales. On life.
David Foster Wallace
Advertising is the best insurance that you can take out on your business. You can buy fire insurance on your stock of goods, but no company will issue a policy covering your business, the good will as they sometimes call it. You must insure yourself, and the best way to do it is by advertising. Good advertising kept up for a number of years gives you something that no fire can take away.
Frank Farrington
You know those panties that you can barely see, worn by gorgeous bottoms that wiggle in TV or that appear gigantic on the walls of cities, well, know that maybe they are cut in Italy, sewn in China, packaged in Israel, transported from there to America and only later sold all over the world. By doing this, entrepreneurs save money because they pay little for labor, by doing this, those who work obviously earn less and less and instead those who then have to buy them pay more and more anyway, because you know, nowadays transportation and advertising cost more and more.
Carl William Brown
Advertising doesn’t cause addictions. But it does create a climate of denial and it contributes mightily to a belief in the quick fix, instant gratification, the dreamworld, and escape from all pain and boredom. All of this is part of what addicts believe and what we hope for when we reach for our particular substance…. Addiction begins with the hope that something “out there” can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. Advertising is all about this false hope.
Jean Kilbourne
Advertising, in fact, is the effort of business men to take charge of consumption as well as production. They are not content to supply a demand, as the text-books say; they educate the demand as well. In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it would like. A bewildered child in a toy shop is nothing to the ultimate consumer in the world market of today. To say, then, that advertising is merely a way of calling attention To Useful Goods Is A Gorgeous Piece Of Idealization. Advertising Is In Fact The Weed That Has Grown Up Because The Art Of Consumption Is Uncultivated.
Walter Lippmann
Too little advertising is like sowing too little seed. A farmer in planting corn puts a number of grains into each hill and is satisfied if one good healthy stalk comes from each planting. It’s the constant advertiser that is bound to attract attention. It’s the succession of bright, catchy advertisements that refuse to be ignored. That time must be allowed for the fruit to grow, ripen and be gathered is as true as that wheat cannot be reaped the day after it is sown.
Byron W. Orr
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
Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for millions. Advertising is the Archimedean lever that is moving the world. If things were done in another and elder age that advertising is doing now, a whole mythology would gather about it, and we should witness the birth of a young God–powerful, restless, indomitable and wise, dominating. He would flash in the sylvan glades of the want advertisements and disport himself in the sunny whiteness of the department stores’ wide spaces. But what a god he would be! How beneficent, how omnipresent, how powerful!
William Allen White
For some advertising people we can certainly affirm in an undeniable way that we live in the best of all possible worlds, as Leibniz already maintained (read the beautiful book by Voltaire entitled Candide or on Optimism) and more recently Popper, but obviously this reflection is not valid for everyone and that is why a new Voltaire, with his Candide, is preparing to demolish this absurd and simplistic way of being in the world.
Carl William Brown
The fact is that much of advertising’s power comes from this belief that advertising does not affect us. The most effective kind of propaganda is that which is not recognized as propaganda. Because we think advertising is silly and trivial, we are less on guard, less critical, than we might otherwise be. It’s all in fun, it’s ridiculous. While we’re laughing, sometimes sneering, the commercial does its work.
Jean Kilbourne
It is this emphasis on value which for many people excludes ads from admission into the canons of art. The value of art, moreover, especially in literature, is often associated with opposition to our detachment from the dominant values of society. In comparison with literature, ads accept and glorify the dominant ideology while literature often rejects and undermines it. The simple fact that ads answer the brief of their clients accounts for the common perception that while art is a vehicle of honesty, advertising is more likely to be a vehicle of deceit.
Guy W. D. Cook
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
In the hope of affording a better user experience for consumers, many brands have begun to experiment with video advertising on mobile devices, with varying degrees of success so far. The rationale behind it is not only its enhancing effect on user experience, but also the fact it gives advertisers more to work with than a conventional, text-oriented ad space. Think of it as being similar to the contrast between TV advertising and billboard advertising — the ability to get a message across is exponentially better. This point is incredibly useful at this juncture, given that users’ ever-increasing connectivity means they demand to know more about what they are buying (prior to purchase) than ever before.
Will Proops
Advertising is tactical; branding is strategic. The most strategic action you will usually get from an advertising agency will be the brief, the planning document that spells out the proposition the advertising must communicate and defines the market segments it should address. But then what? And what about internally? How will you get your personnel on brand? Is the advertising supposed to convince them as well? How is a glossy television or poster campaign supposed to communicate to your delivery driver and sales assistant the vital roles they each need to play in making sure your company lives up to its promises?
Marcus Osborne
I saw a silly face, quite popular, advertising a hotel. Well, I don’t know what hotel it was, but instead I know two things, the first is that I will never set foot in a place like that, the second is that thinking about it carefully that silly face seems more and more stupid and indecent. Now at this point I ask myself, who knows if these were precisely the communicative effects that the creatives of that advertisement intended?
Carl William Brown
Advertising has been about disrupting the experience of the media and inserting a message distinct from the programming. Media professionals tried their best to insert a message that would align with an audience, but the understanding of the audience was an educated guess, as best. There was inherent waste, and the message was lost on a portion of the audience. The future of advertising is one of a complementary insertion that’s less disruptive, more in alignment with the needs and wants of the audience. This targeting and insertion can be accomplished through data, but the heaviest weight of the interaction relies on the creative. That’s what we have to fix ASAP.
Cory Treffiletti
What history shows though is that if advertising is relevant and respectful consumers will accept it. They recognize that content is not free and a fair value exchange is in everyone’s interests. The million (billion?) dollar question is whether this will happen before the constantly empty food bowl of irrelevant ads has conditioned the audience to tune them out entirely.
Derek Harding
Advertising is the best insurance that you can take out on your business. You can buy fire insurance on your stock of goods, but no company will issue a policy covering your business, the good will as they sometimes call it. You must insure yourself, and the best way to do it is by advertising. Good advertising kept up for a number of years gives you something that no fire can take away.
Frank Farrington
Recent reports suggest that Clear Channel is partnering with certain mobile services to track Americans’ travel patterns and consumer behavior through their phones. By compiling location and demographic data from these sources, Clear Channel intends to provide advertisers and retailers with more information about who is seeing their billboards and whether they visit a particular store after viewing the advertisement. Access to this information in turn allows advertisers and retailers to better target their audience. When done appropriately, targeted advertising may provide consumer benefits, but we must ensure that Americans’ very sensitive information, including their location data, is protected.
Al Franken
Advertising may well change medium, form and style, but the essential fact remains that the banal content of its bullshit is still and always abundantly advocated to the public, even if fortunately it is now increasingly snubbed. Politicians, hucksters, advertising salesmen, persuaders of stupidity will always invite you to be optimistic and to think positively, precisely because this facilitates their interests and prepares the final mockery, the tragedy of your defeat, which will be a positive thing, only for them though.
Carl William Brown
Over the last 12 months, brands have really begun to clock onto two factors which could help significantly improve their advertising on mobile devices – the value of data, and video. In contrast with traditional desktop advertising, many have realised the value of attribution in their mobile advertising, tracking unique users as they browse the web and attempting to correlate their activity with the adverts they see. That said, it means everyone is now claiming to possess “magical” data and algorithms which can help brands concentrate their activity on their target audience. If that’s the case, then what are they targeting them with?
Will Proops
I gave someone a perverse argument not so long ago about why advertising is better than movies. You want to hear it? Movies operate from a really disingenuous premise, that people are heroes. I know a lot of people and have had an opportunity over the years to observe them. Are they heroes…? Let’s put it this way. Advertising tries something simpler and more believable: Products as heroes. I guess the idea is: When all else fails, put your faith in conditioner.
Errol Morris
The fact is that much of advertising’s power comes from this belief that advertising does not affect us. The most effective kind of propaganda is that which is not recognized as propaganda. Because we think advertising is silly and trivial, we are less on guard, less critical, than we might otherwise be. It’s all in fun, it’s ridiculous. While we’re laughing, sometimes sneering, the commercial does its work.
Jean Kilbourne
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
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
Advertisers like to tell parents that they can always turn off the TV to protect their kids from any of the negative impact of advertising. This is like telling us that we can protect our children from air pollution by making sure they never breathe. Advertising is our environment. We swim in it as fish swim in water. We cannot escape it. Unless, of course, we keep our children home from school and blindfold them whenever they are outside of the house. And never let them play with other children. Even then, advertising’s messages are inside our intimate relationships, our homes, our hearts, our heads.
Jean Kilbourne
The stupidity of modern television news and its journalists, unaware sycophants of the powerful consumer society dominated by advertising and ideologically consecrated by the law of market, justifies all the crimes that have been perpetrated and that will be committed in the future, and is therefore perfectly legitimate.
Carl William Brown
In many ways, mobile video advertising is a more advisable option than TV advertising. This is because on the mobile platform brands are able to identify unique users, and as such are able to offer them tailored advertising which is both relevant and timely. This identification even extends to user preferences based on their previous activity, and is far greater than for television, where brands can’t establish exactly who and how many people are watching their advert at any given time. If anything, it highlights the ‘con’ of TV buying, which is based on loose estimations of audience figures, derived from surveying a small proportion of the population and scaling the results up to reflect the entire country.
Will Proops
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas – those insults to human nature – is carried on by the most expert psychological methods – for instance, by always repeating a lie.
George Santayana
What were habitually his final meditations? Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.
James Joyce
Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for millions. Advertising is the Archimedean lever that is moving the world. If things were done in another and elder age that advertising is doing now, a whole mythology would gather about it, and we should witness the birth of a young God–powerful, restless, indomitable and wise, dominating. He would flash in the sylvan glades of the want advertisements and disport himself in the sunny whiteness of the department stores’ wide spaces. But what a god he would be! How beneficent, how omnipresent, how powerful!
William Allen White
A mistake most civilians make about advertising is that they think it is a writing profession. Wrong! Even for copywriters, it is an idea profession. This is why Ivy honors grads fail and fail again at ad careers. They end up writing overthought and overwrought 27-word headline ads that make sense only to them. Stick to blogging jobs, lit majors.
Mark Duffy
I’ve met many an advertising professional who thought ‘Half my advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half’ was funny. It isn’t. In this day and age, it’s a disgrace, an appalling indictment of the bad habits we have all got into, that we don’t know, even now, whether it’s half, or a third, or a quarter – or three quarters, for that matter. All we know for certain is that advertising is working even less efficiently for us now than it did 20 years ago.
Marcus Osborne
One of the hottest areas of advertising growth involves the Internet. The interactive nature of Internet marketing offers unique marketing advantages that conventional electronic media, such as radio and television, cannot replicate. Interactive advertising affords the marketer the ability to engage the consumer in a direct and personal way. Another major advantage of online advertising is the content is not limited by geography or time. In addition, the results for advertisement campaigns may be monitored in real-time. Essentially all of the leading 100 national advertisers in the United States have begun advertising on the web.
Michael A. Mcgregor
Advertising has the task of matching our need for goods with the need for goods to be consumed. Its invitations are explicit requests to give up objects that we already own, and that perhaps still perform a good service, because others have arrived in the meantime, others that “you can’t not have”.
Umberto Galimberti
Advertising to the uninterested is wasted. Unfortunately, in the digital world, even though wasting advertisers’ money is a concern, wasting the time of the audience is damaging the medium itself. Lack of relevance led to the attention arms race – the cause of much of the irritation of today’s ads. Advertisers went from static banners to ever more attention-grabbing formats: animations, popups, pop-unders, interstitials etc. Each of these gave a temporary lift, but the underlying irrelevance meant the lift was temporary. The end result is that consumers have been trained to ignore ads.
Derek Harding
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
According to the estimate of a prominent advertising firm, above 90 per cent, of the earning capacity of the prominent nostrums is represented by their advertising. And all this advertising is based on the well-proven theory of the public’s pitiable ignorance and gullibility in the vitally important matter of health.
Samuel Hopkins Adams
Brands and advertisers today are begging for a better experience when it comes to engaging consumers. On a constant mission for better relevancy and less intrusiveness, advertisers are increasingly raising questions about the transparency of decisions and the costs involved across the entire ecosystem. This is where hype turns into reality.
Antti Pasila
Good, careful advertising of the steady, never-let-up sort will positively win. It isn’t the fisherman who goes thrashing along and fishes the whole length of a stream in an afternoon that gets the fish. It’s the quiet chap who finds a likely looking hole and camps out right by it until he gets his fish and then tries another in the same careful way. More than that, this careful fisherman does not get discouraged because Mr. Fish fails to snap up the hook at the first cast. He tries the bait and he tries the flies, and he changes his lure and his point of view until he hits it right. If the business doesn’t respond to the advertising, change the advertising. Don’t lay it up to the public that your bait doesn’t tempt them.
Frank Farrington
The ubiquity of advertising is, of course, just another effect of our uninhibited efforts to use all the media to get all sorts of information to everybody everywhere. Since the places to be filled are everywhere, the amount of advertising is not determined by the needs of advertising, but by the opportunities for advertising, which become unlimited.
Daniel Boorstin
A television is a container filled with products. Inside are detergents, cars, cameras, breakfast cereals, and other televisions. It is not the programs that are interrupted by commercials, but the opposite. A television is a form of electronic packaging. It is nothing else. Without the products, nothing exists. The concept of an educational program is idiotic.
Don DeLillo
It has been said, no doubt in good faith and certainly with some reason, that advertising as currently carried on gives the body of consumers valuable information and guidance as to the ways and means whereby their wants can be satisfied and their purchasing power can be best utilized. To the extent to which this holds true, advertising is a service to the community. But there is a large reservation to be made on this head. Advertising is competitive; the greater part of it aims to divert purchases … from one channel to another channel of the same general class. And to the extent to which the efforts of advertising in all its branches are spent on this competitive disturbance of trade, they are, on the whole, of slight if any immediate service to the community.
Thorstein Veblen
It is this emphasis on value which for many people excludes ads from admission into the canons of art. The value of art, moreover, especially in literature, is often associated with opposition to our detachment from the dominant values of society. In comparison with literature, ads accept and glorify the dominant ideology while literature often rejects and undermines it. The simple fact that ads answer the brief of their clients accounts for the common perception that while art is a vehicle of honesty, advertising is more likely to be a vehicle of deceit.
Guy W. D. Cook
Defenders of advertising may claim that … advertising is necessary for economic growth, which benefits us all. The truth of this claim, however, is open to debate. Critics maintain that advertising is a waste of resources and serves only to raise the price of advertised goods … they may also contend that advertising in general reinforces mindless consumerism.
William H. Shaw
Advertising doesn’t cause addictions. But it does create a climate of denial and it contributes mightily to a belief in the quick fix, instant gratification, the dreamworld, and escape from all pain and boredom. All of this is part of what addicts believe and what we hope for when we reach for our particular substance…. Addiction begins with the hope that something “out there” can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. Advertising is all about this false hope.
Jean Kilbourne
Perception of products in advertising is influenced by clever placement in the right context. Companies here use the insights from psychology into people’s perceptual capacities in a targeted manner. In the end the goal is to awaken attentiveness in customers. Only those stimuli that generate attentiveness will consciously be perceived by customers and efficiently processed further.
Gerhard Raab & Jason Goddard
Too little advertising is like sowing too little seed. A farmer in planting corn puts a number of grains into each hill and is satisfied if one good healthy stalk comes from each planting. It’s the constant advertiser that is bound to attract attention. It’s the succession of bright, catchy advertisements that refuse to be ignored. That time must be allowed for the fruit to grow, ripen and be gathered is as true as that wheat cannot be reaped the day after it is sown.
Byron W. Orr
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
Advertising, in fact, is the effort of business men to take charge of consumption as well as production. They are not content to supply a demand, as the text-books say; they educate the demand as well. In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it would like. A bewildered child in a toy shop is nothing to the ultimate consumer in the world market of today. To say, then, that advertising is merely a way of calling attention to useful goods is a gorgeous piece of idealization. Advertising is in fact the weed that has grown up because the art of consumption is uncultivated.
Walter Lippmann
Why do Jell-O and Coke pay Bill Cosby to sell their products? Why do politicians wrap themselves in the flag? Why is Miller brewed the American way? Why do we love baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet? Why? Because these people and symbols are already powerful anchors in the culture, and the advertisers are simply transferring the feeling we have for these people or symbols to their products. They use them as ways to make us receptive to whatever it is they’re selling.
Anthony Robbins
You think these annoying ads are free? They really are not. You pay. You get charged for bandwidth overages on your ISP Internet plan. So, wait — we are paying to get advertising that we don’t want? First of all, what gives advertisers the right to distract us and cost us money? One thing to keep in mind is that in order for content to be provided for free, we may have to deal with the advertising that supports it. If Internet advertising more closely resembled the TV or radio models, it would be acceptable. However, it goes far beyond those simple approaches. Year after year, Internet advertising gobbles up more and more of our bandwidth, costing us more money. Every month, it seems, many of us are billed for overages. Perhaps we could live with the advertising clutter on our screen if the marketers would get their act together. If I want a quiet page, I should be able to get a quiet page. You’d think the ad community could figure out how to stop abusing users so we could live together peacefully once again.
Jeff Kagan
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