Samuel Johnson Quotes

The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.

Marketers want to get their messages in front of you. They must get their messages in front of you, just to survive. The only problem is-do you really want more marketing messages?

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow.

The forced influence of advertising has given us completely useless TV. You don't want that on the Net. But most on-line information providers need to attract advertising - which slows download times and clutters the screen with windows.

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

Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.

It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data - it doesn't mean the ad is written. Then you've got to close the door and write something - that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

There's a fine line between marketing and grand theft.

Remakes, in general, are a result of necessity being the mother of invention. They can't open movies consistently and break through the advertising clutter that's out there.

I'd like to be remembered, as a copywriter who had some big ideas. That's what the advertising business is all about. Big ideas

All advertising, whether it lies in the field of business or of politics, will carry success by continuity and regular uniformity of application.

We're at the point now where the challenge isn't how to communicate effectively with e-mail; it's ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most.

Somebody finally has to get out an ad, often after hours. Somebody has to stare at a blank piece of paper. Probably nothing was ever more bleak. This is probably the very height of lonesomeness. He is one person and he is alone

All business models have something challenging about them, but the problem with the attention merchant business model they have is they need to keep increasing the amount of ads they deliver to people and therefore make their product worse.

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

Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.

We live in an age in which superfluous ideas abound and essential ideas are lacking.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.

I think actually the marketing community is approaching a crisis: There are just too many messages competing for too little attention. That is the fundamental problem.

I do voiceovers, but being on-camera and selling something? I wasn't really interested. And then I thought, well, wait a minute. Everybody's selling something. When you turn on the tube... And then if you go to Europe or Asia, everyone is selling something. All the guys that don't want to be seen selling something here are selling something there. So I thought what the hell?

I like alternating commercials with movies, because it keeps the pace up. You can't slack on a commercial. You need to go fast. That's a terrific piece of action, I think if that was scheduled for a movie, you'd put that in for two or three days worth of work.