Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.

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

Studies indicate that these children are more susceptible to advertising and even less likely to understand the purpose of this advertising.

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

A company like Nike can convince people to buy Air Jordans even though they never saw Michael Jordan play.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.

Maybe it's naive to say, but it almost seems like, in the past, people tried to sell you something you would actually need, like a hammer or a broom or a toothbrush. But now there's this notion that they can sell you anything. And all they have to do is convince you that you need it.

Advertising creates and changes this foundation of all popular action, public sentiment, or public opinion. It is the most potent influence in adopting and changing the habits and modes of life, affecting what we eat, what we wear, and the work and play of the whole Nation. Formerly it was an axiom that competition was the life of trade. Under the methods of the present day it would seem to be more appropriate to say that advertising is the life of trade.

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.

Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

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

Children have adopted a consumerist attitude - I dare you to entertain me.

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.

Companies are very, very good - better than consumers themselves - at knowing what consumers are actually craving.

We live in an era of consumerism and it's all about desire-based consumerism and it has nothing to do with things we actually need.

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.

Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.

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

Advertising ought to work by telling you what it is you want to tell, you should understand what you want us to do, what you want us to think, where you want us to shop.

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.

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

Increasingly, consumers don't search for products and services. Rather, services come to their attention via social media.

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?'