ADVERTISING QUOTES

quotations about advertising

Adversity quote

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

The Spatula, May, 1909

Tags: business


Advertising is a tax paid for being unremarkable.

ROBERT STEPHENS

attributed, Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers


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

speech, Jan. 26, 2005

Tags: Noam Chomsky


The business that considers itself immune to the necessity for advertising sooner or later finds itself immune to business.

DERBY BROWN

attributed, Quote Unquote


The only business that is worth advertising is the business that would succeed without advertising.

N. W. AYER

Better Business

Tags: business


The climate of advertising responds instantly to any social change, making ads in themselves an invaluable means of knowing "where it's at."

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

Culture Is Our Business

Tags: Marshall McLuhan


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

THOMAS JEFFERSON

letter to Nathaniel Macon, Jan. 12, 1819

Tags: Thomas Jefferson, newspapers


The only people who care about advertising are the people who work in advertising.

GEORGE PARKER

Confessions of a Mad Man


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

FRED ALLEN

Treadmill to Oblivion

Tags: Fred Allen


The man who stops advertising to save money is the man who stops the clock to save time.

ANONYMOUS


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

"A Black Woman Amongst Mad Men", Huffington Post, March 3, 2016


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

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Infinite Jest

Tags: David Foster Wallace


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

DEAN ACHESON

attributed, Selling the Dream


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

Media/Impact: An Introduction to Mass Media


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

Will Rogers Speaks

Tags: Will Rogers, money


No matter which area of the industry you operate in, it is your mutual responsibility to ensure that the future of mobile advertising is safe, transparent and provides an optimal user experience.

LINDSAY ROWNTREE

"OpenX Panel: Mobile In-App Advertising Has Some Interesting Challenges", ExchangeWire, February 19, 2016


Advertising is image management.

THOMAS JOHN REYNOLDS & JERRY CORRIE OLSON

Understanding Consumer Decision Making


Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does.

STUART HENDERSON BRITT

attributed, Marketing Management and Administrative Action

Tags: business


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

The Discourse of Advertising

Tags: society


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

"The Party"

Tags: Donald Barthelme