Marshall McLuhan Quotes

People love advertising in particular but they hate advertising in general.

There is no such thing as national advertising. All advertising is local and personal. It's one man or woman reading one newspaper in the kitchen or watching TV in the den.

You can define advertising as the science of creating and placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets him or her to take some action.

Advertising is 'an evil service'.

Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising.

If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the popular culture that advertisements are silly.

Dealing with ads is depressing. You don't make anyone's life better by making advertisements work better.

I wish all consumers were as gullible as advertising's biggest critics. Anyone who believes advertising is that powerful will believe almost anything.

I love commercials.

I think the ongoing discussion of the world of advertising is, 'Where is the soul in advertising?'

I'm in the industry, and I'll fast-forward through the ads most of the time. But I'll stop for the good ones.

'Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising' by Winston Fletcher - the impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, self-serving, occasionally brilliant but ultimately shallow business.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there's one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

No, I most certainly do not think advertising people are wonderful. I think they are horrible, and the worst menace to mankind, next to war; perhaps ahead of war. They stand for the material viewpoint, for the importance of possessions, of desire, of envy, of greed. And war comes from these things.

Advertising is the art of persuasion.

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do.

We compete with all of the time that consumers spend when they're not sleeping, they're not eating, not going to work or going to school. Because everything else is entertainment time.

What needs to change is the nature of advertising itself. That business hasn't really evolved since the days of Don Draper.

The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.

People ultimately get what they deserve on TV. What people end up watching is what the advertising end up glomming onto and promoting.

Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.

Advertising enriches life by quickening the imagination, arousing interest and enlarging the taste.