Quotes about advertising

There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.

It was an appeal to reason, and they’re always dangerous. You can’t trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.

Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales.

‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—’

That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down.

The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to sell things that people don’t really need, they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self. They do this, for example, by telling you that you will stand out from the crowd by using this product and so by implication be more fully yourself.

Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy. It is closely related to certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of "The Free World." For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice.

"The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy."

It was turning into a sly, anti–free market statement, and irony irritated him. There was no place for irony in marketing: it made people want to look for deeper meaning. There was no place in marketing for that, either.

mktg case study #9: mktg lies

OCCASIONALLY, JUST OF COURSE, YOUR COMPANY WILL BE CAUGHT IN A LIE. THIS IS NOT GOOD. IF POSSIBLE, IMMEDIATELY FIRE SOMEONE EXPENDABLE AND PUBLICLY APOLOGIZE. IF NOT, YOU MUST STICK TO THE LIE. PERCEPTION IS REALITY.

mktg case study #6: mktg cigarettes

FOR A PRODUCT THAT KILLS ITS CUSTOMERS, THIS IS PRETTY EASY. FOR ONE THING, YOU ONLY NEED TO CONVINCE PEOPLE TO START BUYING. BUT THE BEST PART IS THAT YOU GET TO DEFEND THE ACT OF SELLING A PRODUCT YOUR CUSTOMERS CAN’T STOP BUYING BY CLAIMING THEY HAVE FREEDOM OF CHOICE. BEFORE EACH MARKETING CAMPAIGN, PRACTICE THE LINE: “IT IS NOT THE POLICY OF OUR COMPANY TO DICTATE THE LIFESTYLE OF OUR CUSTOMERS.”

To get a good job in marketing, you need to market yourself.

Marketing (or mktg, which is what you write when you’re taking lecture notes at two hundred words per minute) is the biggest industry in the world, and it’s invisible. It’s the planet’s largest religion, but the billions who worship it don’t know it. It’s vast, insidious and completely corrupt.

Marketing is like LA. It’s like a gorgeous, brainless model in LA. A gorgeous, brainless model on cocaine having sex drinking Perrier in LA. That’s the best way I know how to describe it.