Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

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.

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.

In today's world, marketers reach inside the home and attempt to figure out not what's good for your daughter, because that is not their business, but what deep desires they can manipulate, stimulate and ostensibly satisfy in order to produce cold, hard cash.

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

The people who flood our living-rooms with a smorgasbord of commercial messages about fetid breath, moist underarms and troubled intestines know this: an appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product.

We function in a pack mentality. This is our tribe. And this is how we are exploited - sold a bill of goods and a household of products.

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.

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

The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.

The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

What the results are telling them is that the most money is spent in volume by young people. They also see young people as the consumers of tomorrow and are trying to capture their attention from their competitors.

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

I want young people to be able to buy into what I design. When I was young, I wanted to buy designer brands even if all I could afford was the cheapest wallet, the cheapest pen, the cheapest T-shirt because I wanted to be a part of it.

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

Advertisers don't want to be ignored, and they are drunk on our data, which is what Google and other large networks are really selling. The ads are almost a by-product; what companies really want to know is what antiperspirant a woman of 25-34 is most likely to purchase after watching 'House of Cards.'

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.

Marketers are out there trying to figure out how to get your money out of your child.

When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between 'teenyboppers' and 'counterculture consumers.'

Advertisers realize that Gen Y is the largest purchasing cohort. Also, that you're going to have to accept some different modes of thinking if you're going to get to them.

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

One of the big themes - if not the big theme - of 'Mockingjay - Part 1' is the battle of the airwaves. I don't think teenagers really understand the role propaganda has in our lives in terms of politics, advertising, and the general manipulation of imagery.

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.

Advertisers rip out one another's conscience to control the spending impulses of males ages 18 to 34, who now have the cyber world at their fingertips. They want more.