Advertisements Quotes

“An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.

Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.

How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“That's a big trunk," James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. "It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly."

"That's just what they used to say in the ads," I said...”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“What’s up with your hair?’ I ask. ‘Aren’t you worried you’ll be spotted by angels flying above with all that blue?’

‘War paint,’ says Dee, fastening his seatbelt.

‘Except it’s in our hair instead of on our faces,’ says Dum, starting the engine. ‘Because we’re original like that.’

‘Besides, are poisonous frogs worried about being spotted by birds?’ asks Dee. ‘Are poisonous snakes? They all have bright markings.’

‘You’re a poisonous frog now?’ I ask.

‘Ribbit.’ He turns and flicks out his tongue at me. It’s blue.

My eyes widen. ‘You dyed your tongue too?’

Dee smiles. ‘Nah. It’s just Gatorade.’ He lifts up a bottle half-full of blue liquid. ‘Gotcha.’ He winks.

‘“Hydrate or Die,” man,’ says Dum as we turn onto El Camino Real.

‘That’s not Gatorade’s marketing,’ says Dee. ‘It’s for some other brand.’

‘Never thought I’d say this,’ says Dum, ‘but I actually miss ads. You know, like “Just Do It.” I never realized how much of life’s good advice came from ads. What we really need now is for some industrious soul to put out a product and give us a really excellent saying to go with it. Like “Kill ’Em All and Let God Sort ’Em Out.”’

‘That’s not an advertising jingle,’ I say.

‘Only because it wasn’t good advice back in the day,’ says Dum. ‘Might be good advice now. Attach a product to it, and we could get rich.”
― Susan Ee, End of Days

“Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing”
― Robert Bresson

“The very idea of massified advertising meant that large cirulation newpapers were not in the business of selling information to people but rather of selling the attention of their readers to commercial concerns... to tap into the resorvoir of resources constitutred by the growing urban populations”
― Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

“I emphasise it now; I had little-to-nothing in common with other people. Their values I did not comprehend, their ideals were to me a living horror. Call it ostentatious but I even sought to provide tangible proof of my withdrawal from the world. I posted a sign in the entrance to the building wherein I dwelt; a sign that indicated I had no wish to be disturbed by anyone, for any purpose whatsoever.

As these convictions took hold of me and, as I denied, nay even repudiated, the hold that the current society of men possesses over its ranks, as I retreated into a hermitage of the imagination, disentangling my own concerns from those paramount to the age in which I happened to be born, an age with no claim to be more enlightened, significant or progressive than any other, I tried to make a stand for the spirit. Tyranny, in this land, I was told, was dead. But I contend that the replacement of one form of tyranny with another is still tyranny. The secret police now operate not via the use of brute force in dark underground cells; they operate instead by a process of open brainwashing that is impossible to avoid altogether. The torture cells are not secret; they are everywhere, and so ubiquitous that they are no longer seen for what they are.

One may abandon television; one may abandon all forms of broadcast media, even the Internet, but the advertising hoardings in every street, on vehicles, inside transport centres, are still there. And they contain the same messages.

Only the very rich can avoid their clutches utterly. Those who have obtained sufficient wealth may choose their own surroundings, free from the propaganda of a decayed futurity. And yet, and yet, in order to obtain such a position of freedom it is first necessary to have served the ideals of the tyranny slavishly, thereby validating it.

("The Tower")”
― Mark Samuels, Best New Horror 23

“Advertisements on YouTube are the new infomercials.”
― J.R. Rim

“A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Birds looked like an echo of birds, fat white clouds looked as if they were there to sell you fabric softener or air travel or health insurance.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Sharing the same exact content, message or advertisements over and over again only showcases your limited content and a serious lack of depth in your message.”
― Loren Weisman

“If it were not for advertising, only a negligible fraction of prepubescent boys who do would know what a pantyliner or a tampon is.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Previously, leaving the couch and walking up to the television to change the channel might cost more effort than merely enduring the awful advertisement and associated anxiety. But with a remote in hand, the viewer can click a button and move away effortlessly. Add cable television and the ability to change channels without returning the set (not to mention hundreds of channels to watch instead of just three), and the audience's orientation to the program has utterly changed. The child armed with the remote control is no longer watching a television program, but watching television—moving away from anxiety states and into more pleasurable ones.

Take note of yourself as you operate a remote control. You don't click the channel button because you are bored, but because you are mad: Someone you don't trust is attempting to make you anxious. You understand that it is an advertiser trying to make you feel bad about your hair (or lack of it), your relationship, or your current SSRI medication, and you click away in anger. Or you simply refuse to be dragged still further into a comedy or drama when the protagonist makes just too many poor decisions. Your tolerance for his complications goes down as your ability to escape becomes increasingly easy. And so today's television viewer moves from show to show, capturing important moments on the fly. Surf away from the science fiction show's long commercial break to catch the end of a basketball game's second quarter, make it over to the first important murder on the cop show, and then back to the science fiction show before the aliens show up.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Why can't we just look like ourselves? Why can't we create a personal style and not adopt one sanctioned by some magazine or TV show?”
― Jim Brickman, Simple Things

“Today, one must pay for a world where there is nothing to buy.”
― Girish Kohli

“The brochures remained perfectly stacked, looming over their conversation, mocking his failure with their pristine tri-folds.”
― Mandy Ashcraft

“I loved that there were cat symbols everywhere: feline figurines in window storefronts, cat posters, and cat ads. Even the construction signs were cats- pink-and-white Hello Kitty figures hanging off barriers, to keep pedestrians from stumbling into holes in the road.”
― Rachel Cohn, My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life

“Fascinated and frequently baffled colleagues would often listen to Fields with heads slightly to one side as he claimed that he did not accept any simple and obvious distinction between Life and Death ... he had been bequeathed a kind of universal machine rather than a particular personality ... he often astounded listeners by claiming that his present self had been reconstituted precisely for an historical moment in which his entire purpose and destiny was to reactivate an inherited philosophical machina. The purpose of this engine was to create what he called a Theology of Advertisements.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Advertising is often the price we pay for not paying, or for not having paid, for the product.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“... so if you like to vomit, try SICKOS. So good, you can't hold 'em down!”
― Alan Grant

“Conceptual Games. Dr Nathan pondered the list on his desk-pad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome Museum; (2) chemical and topographical analyses of a young woman’s excrement; (3) diagrams of female orifices: buccal, orbital, anal, urethral, some showing wound areas; (4) the results of a questionnaire in which a volunteer panel of parents were asked to devise ways of killing their own children; (5) an item entitled ‘self-disgust’ - someone’s morbid and hate-filled list of his faults. Dr Nathan inhaled carefully on his gold-tipped cigarette. Were these items in some conceptual game? To Catherine Austin, waiting as ever by the window, he said, ‘Should we warn Miss Novotny?’

Biomorphic Horror. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. Unsure whether she was listening to him, he continued: ‘Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’

Sink Speeds. During this period, after his return to Karen Novotny’s apartment, Travers was busy with the following projects: a cogent defence of the documentary films of Jacopetti; a contribution to a magazine symposium on the optimum auto-disaster; the preparation, at a former colleague’s invitation, of the forensic notes to the catalogue of an exhibition of imaginary genital organs. Immersed in these topics, Travers moved from art gallery to conference hall. Beside him, Karen Novotny seemed more and more isolated by these excursions. Advertisements of the film of her death had appeared in the movie magazines and on the walls of the underground stations. ‘Games, Karen,’ Travers reassured her. ‘Next they’ll have you filmed masturbating by a cripple in a wheel chair.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“Actions are far better than advertisements.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“What he found was astonishing. Every wall was plastered with posters and flyers. Some were like the ones he'd seen on the brick wall at King's Cross; others seemed to advertise specific market traders. Some were old and faded; some seemed much more recent. Some sounded quite ordinary-- Cocksfoot & Sable: Fine Ales and Cheeses; Clancy's Rustic Furnishings-- and some were more unusual. Tom frowned over Yellow Belle's Night-Woven Yarns, and felt his heart beat faster at Spindle Ermine's Love Spells. What kind of a market was this? He thought he understood Bird-Cherry's Flowers and Fruits, or Straw Dot's Most Accurate Timepieces, and even Scarlet Tiger Sleeve Tattoos-- but what was he to make of Pretty Pinion Wing Repairs or Mother Shipton, Laundress of Dreams, or Pale Eggar's Glamours and Charms, or Dusky Sallow's Evercoats?”
― Joanne Harris, The Moonlight Market