Advertising Quotes

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as a human experiment--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year.

~ Naomi Wolf

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

~ Naomi Wolf

Women are mere beauties in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while beauty is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, beauty is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence--but it is not a moral act. From the beauties in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson--that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them.

~ Naomi Wolf

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

~ Naomi Wolf

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced beautiful images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that justify the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel worth less was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.

~ Naomi Wolf

Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking beautiful. If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

~ Naomi Wolf

Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

~ Naomi Wolf

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her Health: if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

~ Naomi Wolf

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

~ Naomi Wolf

Glitters overshadow the subtle beauty... Same goes for publicity and authenticity.

~ Talees Rizvi

The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.

~ James S.a. Corey

A businessman who stops advertising to save money is like a foolish who stops a clock to save time.

~ Moosa Rahat

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard made a similar observation about the use of material goods as symbols of immaterial values. He noted that any given material object has two kinds of value: it has use value (the amount of utility which can be derived from the good), and it has sign value (a value based on what the object means to the person who owns it.) Advertisers constantly attempt to increase the amount that people will pay for products by infusing them with artificial sign value. Emotional branding, for example, is the practice of using images to link a product with a positive emotional state, so that people will unthinkingly purchase the product when they crave the emotion.

~ Melinda Selmys

The heart is a muscle. You 'know' in your limbic system. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes it buy things.

~ William Gibson

Don't wait, just sweat.

~ Amit Kalantri

Don't fight to be right, but fight when you are right.

~ Amit Kalantri

Starting a business with brother either ends business or ends brotherhood.

~ Amit Kalantri

Life tests us to see our level of endurance.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The meaning of life in western secular society is to be successful. So many people are success mad and they are encouraged to reach for something and have so called worthwhile goals. Money, fame, power, good looks, possessions are the indicators of success and the media and advertising companies exploit this. People are conditioned to believe that they can only feel happy or good about themselves if they have these things. This of course is not true.

~ Tim Crawshaw

The word love has been so abused by publicity and advertisements that we no longer know really what it means.

~ Jean Vanier

If someone tells you that they’re called “blueberries” because they’re berries and they’re blue—believe them.

~ Clifford Cohen

...Her boyfriend gives her a Mercedes, [her friends] say, 'Oh, that's nice.' But her boyfriend gives her a diamond, they say, 'Oh, he's serious.' It's not just the gift of love-it's the gift of commitment. She's not jumping up and down because she got a diamond ring but because she got a guy! There are those who say you don't need diamonds. I say they're right. Just like you don't need sex.

~ Tom Zoellner

Prostitutes are paid for taking their clothes off. Celebrities are paid for putting others' clothes on.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

~ Naomi Wolf

In spite of hopes to the contrary, pornography and mass culture are working to collapse sexuality with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way sex it. This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they are behaving within socially accepted norms.

~ Susan G. Cole

Advertising and marketing philosophies that thrive on emphasizing 'natural' differences don't stay in the realm of advertising and marketing--they spill into how we justify sexism and racism at every life stage.

~ Andi Zeisler

Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.

~ Edwin H. Land

Health makes good propaganda.

~ Naomi Wolf

...isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all the advertising men who create it?

~ David Riesman

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

~ John Berger

The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.

~ John Berger

Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.

~ Brené Brown

Creativity is a clashing of opposites.

~ Graham Fink

Always remember: a brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world, a corner of someone's mind.

~ John Hegarty

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

~ Sara Sheridan

Now we were standing around holding hands and not much was going on. I began to think of words I had known, just for fun, to fill up the blank space in my head. Couch, I thought. Cuisinart, I thought.The words felt different right now than they had before. They meant a little less, held a little less, but seemed somehow fuller: I had never really noticed how much sound there was in a word. The way it filled your mouth up with emptiness, a sort of loosened emptiness that you could tongue, an emptiness you could suck on like a stone. Stomach, I thought. Variety, I thought. Expectation. Intimation. Infiltration. Infiltration: I tongued that one further. I knew it had a hostile aspect, like someone breaking into your house or posing as someone you should trust. But it also had a lovely sound, a kind of tapered point and a gently ruffled edge, and as I repeated it over and over in my mouth it took on a really great flavor and I thought of water filtering in and out of a piece of fabric, back and forth, moving between, soaking it and washing out, soaking in and taking with it pale tremors of color, memory, resistance, all that stuff, until I felt like one of those pieces of cloth on the television commercials that got washed with the name-brand cleanser and is now not only white, but silky and mountain-scented.

~ Alexandra Kleeman

Advertising is far more than just a communications industry. It's a problem-solving industry that also teaches you about life, how it encourages you to focus your thinking and produce something of genuine value. Why? Because that will make the advertising task so much easier. You're not equipped with a unique set of insights and experiences across a broad range of markets, allowing you to bring clarity and inspiration to anything you wish to produce.

~ John Hegarty

Sound an alarm! Advertising, not deals, builds brands.

~ David Ogilvy