Tim Wu Quotes

When you take the individual out of the equation, then you're making programming based on some marketer's idea of what will sell, and not based on the idea of what an individual would like.

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.

I don't need to know how they make Coca-Cola. I think it tastes just fine not knowing what the ingredients are. I think there are some things that should be kept secret.

As late as 2007, Facebook was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up. An advertising space seemed to be the obvious answer, but how that would tap into the massive value of the personal data uploaded to the company every day remained a puzzle.

For the most part, cookies aren't dangerous. They were created so advertisers could get a better idea of who you are and what you're interested in, so they could send you ads you're more likely to find relevant.

We use nearly 5 thousand different data points about you to craft and target a message. The data points are not just a representative model of you. The data points are about you, specifically.

There is no question that advertising is an art, and manipulation is the art of advertising through the medium of the tape.

America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end.

I think that any time reality doesn't match your expectations, it means that marketing was involved.

Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled.

Consumers fall in love with a brand and it's important for a brand to develop and stretch itself to provide for their consumers. I don't suspect that a customer will walk into a store to buy a pair of jeans and end up buying a sofa, but it's about providing loyal consumers with a choice to create a lifestyle.

It may be that them whose pleasure brings you into this world owes you a living, but it don't mean the world is responsible.

The only means to well-being is to increase the quantity of products. This is what business aims at.

Why should I expect to be exempt from censure; the unfailing lot of an elevated station? My Heart tells me it has been my unremitted aim to do the best circumstances would permit; yet, I may have been very often mistaken in my judgment of the means.

With the end of communism and the opening of Third World markets, the potential for Playboy is huge. It has been said that the two most famous trademarks in the world are Coca-Cola and the Playboy bunny rabbit. There is certainly no one else in our area that represents the American dream in this particular kind of way. That rabbit means economic freedom, personal freedom and political freedom. That potential is unlimited.

Well, there is a contradiction in a sense. If you're making commercials which sell products which are unhealthy or which are unnecessary, I think that you are part of a system - I am part of a system which encourages people to buy things and do things which are not to their best interest. And to that extent you could say it was contradictory.

I get guilty when I spend money on silly things like clothes and stuff. Having experienced a completely different extreme of wealth, and I don't mean me being poor or rich, I mean knowing that 40 quid that gets spent on a pair of shoes could go a long way for a family in Georgia for a week or even a month, having experienced that, you're a bit more [guilty].

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

I think if you ask what people really mean by happiness today, it is the experience of unlimited consumption - the kind of thing Mr. Huxley described in "Brave New World."

Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, "What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?" I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this, but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can.

When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.

Advertising is the most potent influence in adapting and changing the habits and modes of life affecting what we eat, what we wear, and the work and play of a whole nation.

I encourage you to accept that you may not be able to see a path right now, but that doesn't mean it's not there.