Advertising Sayings & Quotes

Scroll down to see over 100 sayings & quotes surrounding the world of advertising, marketing, media and publishing - from some of the most famous (or infamous) icons in - and beyond - the industry.....  

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- A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. - David Ogilvy

- A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising. - James Collins

- A viewer who skips the advertising is the moral equivalent of a shoplifter. - Nicholas Johnson

- Ads become information when they’re in context. - Steve Larsen

- 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 eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick.  - Samuel Johnson

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

- Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease. - Author Unknown

- 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

- Advertising – a judicious mixture of flattery and threats. - Northrop Frye

- Advertising is a bit like playing make-believe.  - Hartman Jule

- Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.  - Marshall McLuhan

- Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art. - William Bernbach

- 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. Olive

- Advertising is only another form of statistics. - Hartman Jule

- 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

- Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret . . . to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink. - Leo Burnett

- Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need. - Will Rogers

- Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths. - Edgar A. Shoaff

- Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, LUXURY and ease for millions - William Allen White

- Advertising is the life of trade. - Calvin Coolidge

- Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on - Bill Cosby

- Advertising is the poetry of Capitalism - Michael Maynard

- Advertising is the principal reason why the business man has come to inherit the earth.  - James Randolph Adams

- Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.  - George Orwell

- Advertising looks fun and easy to do. So does playing the piano, Until you try it. Stavros Cosmopulos

- Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.  - Stephen Butler Leacock

- Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals. - David Ogilvy

- 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

- Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. - Stephen Leacock

- As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.  - George Will

- Asked about the power of advertising in research surveys, most agree that it works, but not on them - Eric Clark

- Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation. - Milan Kundera – Czech Novelist, Playwright and Poet

- Buy me and you will overcome the anxieties I have just reminded you of - Michael Schudson

- Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements. - The Ad Contrarian

- Creative without strategy is called art.  Creative with strategy is called advertising - Jef. I Richards

- Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose… the vast majority of editors are incorruptible. - David Ogilvy

- 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

- Don't tell my mother I work in an advertising agency - she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.  - Jacques Seguela

- Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted. - J. K. Galbraith

- First we thought the PC was a calculator.  Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII - and we thought it was a typewriter.  Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television.  With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure. - Douglas Adams

- For better or for worse, our company (The News Corporation Ltd.) is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values. - Keith Rupert Murdoch - 2008

- Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief. - Leo Burnett

- 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

- 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

- I believe that superior creative work always has been, is, and always will be the hub of the wheel in any successful agency - Leo Burnett

- I do not read advertisements – I would spend all my time wanting things - Franz Kafka

- I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes… - Philip Dusenberry

- 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

- I have... had a disturbing dream in which I break through a cave wall near Nag Hammadi and discover urns full of ancient Coptic scrolls.  As I unfurl the first scroll, a subscription card to some Gnostic exercise magazine flutters out.  - Colin McEnroe

- I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books. - P.J. O'Rourke

- 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

- I saw a subliminal advertising executive but only for a second - Steven Wright

- If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn’t have to advertise them. - Will Rogers

- If Advertising had a little more respect for the public, the public would have a lot more respect for advertising – James Randolph Adams

- If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative. - David Ogilvy

- If Thomas Edison had used a focus group he would have just invented a bigger candle. - from The Brand Show episode "The Science of Branding"

- If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue.  - Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Consumer's Guide, 1897

- In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal. - Bill Bernback

- In advertising, sex sells. But only if you're selling sex.  - Jef I. Richards

- In general, my children refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV.  Erma Bombeck

- In our factory, we make lipstick. In our advertising, we sell hope. - Peter Nivio Zarlenga

- It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.  - R. Serling

- It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have.  - B. Earl Puckett

- It used to be that people needed products to survive.  Now products need people to survive. - Nicholas Johnson

- It's getting easier and easier to start a magazine, but it's harder and harder to keep it running - Samir Husni

- Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film. They advertise memories. -  Theodore Parker

- 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

- Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. - J.B. Priestley

- Marketing wants ‘Mr. Right’ but Sales wants ‘Mr. Right Now’  Unknown

- Marriage is a good deal like a circus: there is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising - Edgar Watson Howe

- Never let your ads write cheques that your website can’t cash. Avinash Kaushik

- Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read.  You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife.  Don't tell them to mine.  - David Ogilvy

- News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising. - William Randolph Hearst

- 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

- Plan the sale when you plan the ad. - Leo Burnett

- Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for every one, best both for the body and the mind.” - Albert Einstein

- Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.  - Samuel Johnson

- So long as there’s a jingle in your head, television isn’t free. - Jason Love

- Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising - John Lahr

- The best ad is a good product. - Alan H. Meyer

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

- The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity - George Carlin

- 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

- The fact is, everyone is in sales. Whatever area you work in, you do have clients and you do need to sell. - Jay Abraham

- The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community - by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself. - Walter Jon Williams

- The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial. - Leonard Bernstein

- The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time  - Thomas Jefferson

- The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements. - Thomas Jefferson

- The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad. - Howard Luck Gossage

- The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which business renders.  - Leo Burnett

- 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

- The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. - Bill Cosby

- 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

- To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research." unknown

- We're obviously going to spend a lot in marketing because we think the product sells itself. Jim Alchin

- What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising?  Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public. - Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 1964

- What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself. - Abraham Lincoln

- 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

- 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. 

- You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough. - Joseph E. Levine

- You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.  - Norman Douglas, South Wind

- 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

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