Primary navigation:

QFINANCE Quick Links
QFINANCE Topics
QFINANCE Reference
Ask the Financial Experts Add the QFINANCE search widget to your website

Home > Financial Quotes > Advertising

Financial Quotes
Return to The Bahamas

Advertising Quotes

  • "Advertising is the very essence of democracy."
    Bruce Barton (1886–1967), US advertising executive and author
    Source: Reader's Digest (1955)
  • "Don’t sell the steak; sell the sizzle. It is the sizzle that sells the steak and not the cow, although the cow is, of course, mighty important."
    Elmer Wheeler (1903–1968), US writer
    Source: Principles of Salesmanship (1936?), no. 1
  • "A desirable advertisement will be reasonable, but never dull … original, but never self-conscious … imaginative, but never misleading."
    Fairfax Cone (1903–1977), US advertising executive
    Source: Christian Science Monitor (1963)
  • "The Mass Audience is made up of individuals, and good advertising is written always from one person to another. When it is aimed at millions it rarely moves anyone."
    Fairfax Cone (1903–1977), US advertising executive
    Source: Quoted in The Art and Science of Marketing (Grahame Robert Dowling, 2004)
  • "Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret … to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper, and ink."
    Leo Burnett (1891–1971), US advertising executive and author
    Source: Quoted in Leo Burnett: Star Reacher (Joan Kufrin, 1995)
  • "It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is not a trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country."
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), US writer
    Source: Quoted in Raymond Chandler Speaking (Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine S. Walker, eds., 1962)
  • "An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission."
    Fred Allen (1894–1956), US comedian and satirist
    Source: Treadmill to Oblivion (1954)
  • "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor"
    Jerry Della Femina (1936–), US advertising executive
    Book title, originally suggested as an advertising slogan for Panasonic Corporation.
    Source: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor (1970)
  • "The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures."
    J. K. Galbraith (1908–2006), US economist and diplomat
    Source: The Affluent Society (1958), ch. 20
  • "It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless."
    J. K. Galbraith (1908–2006), US economist and diplomat
    Source: American Capitalism (1956)
  • "Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising."
    John Lahr (1941–), US writer and critic
    Source: Guardian (London) (August 1989)
  • "Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults."
    Gore Vidal (1925–), US novelist and critic
    Source: Rocking the Boat (1962)
  • "Don’t focus on the mink, but what’s in it."
    Jane Trahey (1923–2000), US copywriter and author
    Speaking about her famous advertising campaign for Blackglama fur.
    Source: Quoted in the New York Times (2000)
  • "Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving."
    David Ogilvy (1911–1999), British advertising executive, founder and chairman of Ogilvy & Mather
    Source: Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)
  • "Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things."
    David Ogilvy (1911–1999), British advertising executive, founder and chairman of Ogilvy & Mather
    Source: Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)
  • "When you have nothing to say, sing it."
    David Ogilvy (1911–1999), British advertising executive, founder and chairman of Ogilvy & Mather
    Source: Ogilvy on Advertising (1983)
  • "Ninety per cent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything."
    David Ogilvy (1911–1999), British advertising executive, founder and chairman of Ogilvy & Mather
    Source: Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)
  • "What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it."
    David Ogilvy (1911–1999), British advertising executive, founder and chairman of Ogilvy & Mather
    Source: Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)
  • "Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of foot-binding."
    Dean Acheson (1893–1971), US statesman
    Source: Quoted in Among Friends (David S. McLellan and David C. Acheson, 1980)
  • "I've written books on advertising—cheque books."
    Sir Alan, Baron Sugar (1947–), British entrepreneur, founder of Amstrad electronics company
    Source: The Apprentice (UK)
  • "Make a Fair Product for a Fair Price, then Tell the World"
    William Wrigley (1861–1932), US businessman and founder of Wrigley Company
    Source: “Make a Fair Product for a Fair Price, then Tell the World,” Illustrated World (S. J. Duncan-Clark, March 1922)
  • "Whatever happens, you get your pet back."
    Anonymous
    Slogan of a Manhattan firm founded by two brothers, one a vet, the other a taxidermist.
    Source: Quoted in Architect's Journal (July 13, 2000)
  • "Tell me quick and tell me true, what your product's going to do, or else, my love, to hell with you."
    Anonymous
    Source: Quoted in Marketing (July 2000)
  • "Of course advertising creates wants. Of course it makes people discontented, dissatisfied. Satisfaction with things as they are would defeat the American Dream."
    Bernice Fitz-Gibbon (1895?–1982), US advertising executive
    Source: Macy's, Gimbels and Me (1967)
  • "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half."
    John Wanamaker (1838–1922), US businessman
    Source: Quoted in “How to Acquire Customers on the Web,” Harvard Business Review (Donna L. Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak, 2000)
  • "Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."
    Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), Canadian sociologist and author
    Source: Attributed to
  • "Good advertising can make people buy your product even if it sucks … A dollar spent on brainwashing is more cost-effective than a dollar spent on product improvement."
    Scott Adams (1957–), US cartoonist and humorist
    Source: The Dilbert Principle (1996)
  • "We read advertisements … to discover and enlarge our desires."
    Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004), US Pulitzer-prize-winning historian
    Source: The Image (1961)
  • "It is far easier to write ten passably effective sonnets, good enough to take in the not too enquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public."
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), British novelist and essayist
    Source: On the Margin (1923)
  • "What do you want from me? Fine writing? Or would you like to see the goddam sales curve stop going down and start going up?"
    Rosser Reeves (1910–1984), US advertising executive
    Source: Interview (1965)
  • "Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement."
    Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), British poet, lexicographer, essayist, and critic
    Source: The Idler (1759), no. 40
  • "Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it."
    Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), Canadian humorist, essayist, economist, and historian
    Source: The Perfect Salesman (1924)
  • "The business that considers itself immune to the necessity for advertising sooner or later finds itself immune to business."
    Derby Brown, US businessman
    Source: Attributed

Back to top

Share this page

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Bookmark and Share

Related

Most Viewed

Recommended

Latest

 
QFINANCE www.qfinance.com