Advertising truths

Not a lie actually, this time, but a series of truths…

“The same media people that claim violence on TV doesn’t influence people, are perfectly willing to sell you advertising time.”

Unknown

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

Dean Gooderham Acheson

“Millions of dollars’ worth of advertising shows such little respect for the reader’s intelligence that it amounts almost to outright insult.”

James Randolph Adams

“If advertising had a little more respect for the public, the public would have a lot more respect for advertising.”

James Randolph Adams

“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

“The best ad is a good product.“

Alan H. Meyer

“The best advertising is word of mouth.“

Me

“A good product sells itself.”

Me

“The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.”

Wyndham Lewis

“Examples of exaggeration can be found in almost any advertising medium. The use of the superlative is altogether too prevalent. ‘The finest,’ ‘the best,’ ‘the greatest,’ ‘the purest,’ ‘the most economical,’ and so on ad infinitum, are hurled at the public everywhere. Surely not all products of the same class can be the best or the finest.”

Daniel Starch

“The incessant witless repetition of advertisers’ moron-fodder has become so much a part of life that if we are not careful, we forget to be insulted by it.”

The London Times (1886)

“In the absence of traditional authority, advertising has become a kind of social guide. It depicts us in all the myriad situations possible to a life of free choice. It provides ideas about style, morality, behavior.”

Ronald Berman

“Our society’s values are being corrupted by advertising’s insistence on the equation: Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness.” [Not only youth. This could well be replaced with "wealth".]

John Fisher

“We want consumers to say, ‘That’s a hell of a product’ instead of, ‘That’s a hell of an ad’.”

Leo Burnett

[The trouble is, Leo, they can never say that when advertising lies. Occasionally ads (for example beer ads) are indeed entertaining, but when they says nothing intrinsic about the product, why ever should the audience associate the two?]

“Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor.”

Clare Boothe Luce

[Actually I disagree - religion is much worse, but much advertising is a blight on society - interestingly for exactly the same reasons as religion: lying, encouraging tribal allegiances, extracting money from people with false promises, promoting bad values and playing on people's insecurities.]

“A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable.”

Bernice Fitz-Gibbo

[Very revealing... and that is how they operate.]

“Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

“It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

[This is a little naive because it might be worthwhile advertising competing products to such people, but this does point to the fact that advertisers frequently try to persuade people that they need things which they do not.]

“Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.”

Raymond Chandler

I am not against advertising (or branding and marketing) in principle, I am against lying, exaggeration, misplaced values and exploitation in advertising; and due to greed and lack of principles on the part of advertisers and their clients, that unfortunately means most current advertising. I have always maintained that good advertising is honest and fact-driven (take for example Jack Daniel’s approach).