Maggie Gallagher Quotes

Expensive advertising courts us with hints and images. The ordinary kind merely says, Buy.

Persuasion has become a kind of force. The more the advertiser knows about what consumers want, and the more desires the product and packaging seek to fulfill, the more coercive the force.

You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes.

Advertising gets such a bashing from the world. At parties you are always asked, 'Aren't you just selling people things they don't want?'

In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely absurd.

I don't like ads: I'm too susceptible. I find myself in the supermarket buying Ronseal, and I don't even have a shed.

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

Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product.

Marketing is the devil.

Ads sway kids' preferences. Star athletes spokespeople sway kids' preference.

You can feel how much money goes into commercials by how swiftly they act on your mind. And they've got, like, a hypnotic quality to the way they present their products.

People internalise marketing.

We believe that business is good because it creates value. It is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange; it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

I would rather die than see my face in a car advertisement.

The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.

Like manchurian candidates, we have been made into manchurian consumers, who subconsciously buy when we are triggered by our brand masters.

As I see it, fast food outfits have targeted small children with their advertising in a very effective way. You know, it's clowns and kid's toys and bright colors and things like that.

The history of business has shown that companies usually only regulate themselves if they're forced to by legislation, or out of self-interest - often in the shape of a marketable message that will help sell more products.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

I worry a lot about people using games just for marketing, to get people to buy more stuff, which I think would be the worst possible use.

If you really think about it, when watching television, you have product placement all the time.

When marketers influence habits, they influence peoples' self-identity. And so when a group or company does something that doesn't correspond to our core values, it feels like a betrayal.

But nothing is better than the market, where the customer and the business deal directly with each other, because if you rip people off, word gets out. That business eventually loses its customers, and the good ones that serve people well get the business. You get government in there, and it's just more money for the lawyers who write the bills.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.