Edwin Lefevre Quotes

Programmers and marketing people know how to get into your subconscious - they spend millions of dollars researching colors, shapes, designs, symbols, that affect your preferences, and they can make you feel warm, trusting, like buying. They can manipulate you.

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

The most common trouble with advertising is that it tries too hard to impress people.

A lot of the advertisement is done by saying: first of all, have a complex about who you are.

Creative without strategy is called 'art.' Creative with strategy is called 'advertising.'

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.

Advertising isn't a science. It's persuasion. And persuasion is an art.

In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful.

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.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.

The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange concept has grown around it: if something is to be sold, inaccuracy is not immoral. Hence the art of advertisement - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

Advertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation

What we see is what they're trying to sell us.

It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.

You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.

These ways to make people buy were strange and new to us, and many bought for the sheer pleasure at first of holding in the hand and talking of something new. And once this was done, it was like opium, we could no longer do without this new bauble, and thus, though we hated the foreigners and though we knew they were ruining us, we bought their goods. Thus I learned the art of the foreigners, the art of creating in the human heart restlessness, disquiet, hunger for new things, and these new desires became their best helpers.

We're led by denial like lambs to slaughter, serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water.

...in seduction, as in all forms of marketing, form superseds content.

See the man on the TV with a phony smile. Bring you up, bring you down, he can turn your head around.

Promotion and perception are synonymous twins of art marketing.

People can be induced to swallow anything, provided it is sufficiently seasoned with praise.