Daniel Starch Quotes

Know the difference between Giant and Jumbo? Between two-ounce and a big two-ounce? Between a quart and a full quart? What's a tall 24-inch? What does Extra Long mean? Who's kidding who?

Every time you're exposed to advertising in America you're reminded that this country's most profitable business is still the manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit. High-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure American bullshit.

Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous.

There is actually quite a lot of crossover between the quacks and drug companies. They use the same tricks and tactics to bamboozle people into buying their pills, but drug firms can afford to use slightly more sophisticated versions.

People used to complain that selling a president was like selling a bar of soap. But when you buy soap, at least you get the soap. In this campaign you just get two guys telling you they really value cleanliness.

I don't buy into any of that hogwash. They put that out to sell tickets. It's just a classic horror movie, with the Greek drama formula of good versus evil, and lots of fear.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

I've always felt, and I think I'm qualified to say so because I've won a few awards, that it's a terrible shame to put something in competition with something else to be able to sell something.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.

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.

Markets work when people can evaluate the prices and risks of different products, then pick the ones that work best for them. But when the terms of the deal are hidden, competition doesn't work. And customers aren't the only ones who are hurt.

Warning: This ad has not been cleared for truth and fairness as ads for commercial products are.

You're not allowed to lure people into spending their money or betting their money based on false representations.

If you can pay enough people to buy your .99 ebook and review it positively, and crack one of Amazon's bestseller lists, readers are going to check it out. Especially at a low price point like .99. Customers are suckers for the fallacy that the cream rises to the top.

To be truthful, not much 'engineering' goes into the ShamWow!

If people felt that they were misled with 'It Comes at Night,' they should know that the marketing here is deliberately misleading you in an honest way, in that we're not hiding what isn't there: we're hiding what is there.

Filmstars endorse beauty products, which at times they might not even use. We endorse the product and make innocent people in India spend their money on buying the same products.

The media, when it's functioning properly, protects the public against marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things.

Moisturise, moisturise, moisturise... is the motto of people who are in the business of selling moisturisers. Your body is already 60% water. If that's not moist enough for you, sit in a puddle.

There's nothing more damaging than an irate moviegoer who hasn't seen what the film trailer promised.

And I don't want to use my troubles as an example of what to do and what not to do.

When you have terrorists, you don't throw at them balloons or you don't use rubber sticks, for example. You have to use armaments.

I hate false advertising, like 'Skittles: taste the rainbow.' No one's ever been like, 'Rainbow, right you guys?' Or what's Reese's? 'There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's.' Oh, really? Tell that to my uncle who used to put them in my underwear. Alright, maybe your uncles didn't love you.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

By... [selecting] the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated.