Pithy Sayings

Advertising

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. ... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.
[From "Price Competition in 1955" by Victor Lebow, marketing consultant, in Journal of Retailing, Volume XXXI, number 1, Spring 1955]

There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgement. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.
[From Contact by Carl Sagan, 1985]

Truth in advertising?—But then it wouldn't be advertising.
[A cartoon by Bo Brown, published in ‘Can You Type?’ edited by Charles Preston, 1977]

It makes no difference if the technologies presented are beneficient or even functional. It is advisable, however, that they go fast, make a lot of noise and come in a variety of decorator colors.
[From the short story "Genocide" by Richard Kadrey, in Semiotext(e) SF edited by Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson, 1989]