Marketing

"It seems like the better it gets, the more miserable people become. There’s never a technological advancement where people think, “Wow, we can finally do this!” … And I think a lot of it has to do with advertising. Americans have it constantly drilled into our heads, every fucking day, that we deserve everything to be perfect all the time."

"Advertising sells you things you don't need and can't afford, that are overpriced and don't work. And they do it by exploiting your fears and insecurities, and if you don't have any they'll be glad to give you a few by showing you a nice picture of a woman with big tits. That's the essence of advertising: big tits. Threateningly big tits."

"From any cross-section of ads, the general advertiser's attitude would seem to be: if you are a lousy, smelly, idle, underprivileged and oversexed status-seeking neurotic moron, give me your money."

"There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there's one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art."

"The sponsor may be viewed as a potentate with a strong influence over currents of thought in our society, exercised mainly through television [...] It has tended to displace or overwhelm other influences such as newspapers, school, church, grandpa, grandma. It has become the definer and transmitter of society's values."

"Advertise your business. Do not hide your light under a bushel."

"It is sometimes argued that advertising really does little harm because no one believes it any more anyway. We consider this view to be erroneous. The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe, and that it teaches [in the words of Leo Marx] ‘the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind: words, images, and ideas.’ The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man."

"People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."

"Websites peddling disinformation generate more than $2 billion in advertising revenue each year, according to an analysis by NewsGuard and ComScore. Check My Ads says their goal is not just to take that money out of circulation, but to shed new light on just how the shadowy world of online advertising operates. Some 90% of online ads are generated through an automated process, as opposed to being directly placed by a company. Industry insiders call this system "programmatic advertising," which basically means it is automated by computer software, according to Joshua Lowcock, an executive at the marketing and media agency UM. "It's like a stock exchange," Lowcock said. "When you visit a website, there are multiple advertisers bidding on you in a real-time auction.""

"“But your sign says you can conjure up ever-filled purses,” Holger began. “Advertising,” Martinus admitted. “Corroborative detail intended to lend artistic verisimilitude.”"

"An advertising agency is 85% confusion and 15% commission."

"Marketing ... is the biggest industry in the world, and it’s invisible. It’s the planet’s largest religion, but the billions who worship it don’t know it. It’s vast, insidious and completely corrupt. Marketing is like LA. It’s like a gorgeous, brainless model in LA. A gorgeous, brainless model on cocaine having sex drinking Perrier in LA. That’s the best way I know how to describe it."

"Except for ... people with enough power to tell the studio ‘I’m going to make a movie about dreams and there’s nothing you can do about it,’ ... everything else is driven by marketing, entirely by marketing."

"Another forerunner of modern organization theorists was Andrew Ure, a professor of chemistry. An enthusiastic proponent of “the factory system,” Ure (1835) took a step beyond Adam Smith. Whereas Smith’s pin factory was solely an example of division of labor, Ure pointed out that a factory poses organizational challenges. He asserted that every factory incorporates “three principles of action, or three organic systems”: (a) a “mechanical” system that integrates production processes, (b) a “moral” system that motivates and satisfies the needs of workers, and (c) a “commercial” system that seeks to sustain the firm through financial management and marketing. Harmonizing these three systems, said Ure, was the responsibility of managers."

"Marketing is far too important to be left only to the marketing department!."

"The flaw of target marketing is that it assumes people are indifferent to variety. Suburban white boys won't listen to Rap because supposedly they can't relate to urban black youths hopping around to all beat and no melody. What we get is music segregation on the airwaves and the record racks."

"Give them quality. That's the best kind of advertising in the world."

"Nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest."

"Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives."

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

"Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising."

"The art of marketing is largely the art of brand building. When something is not a brand, it will be probably be viewed as a commodity."

"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing...kill yourself...you're the ruiner of all things good...you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage...kill yourself."

"Google Cayce Pollard and you will find "coolhunter," and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a "sensitive" of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing. Though the truth…is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace."

"Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value."

"I believe we are born with our minds open to wonderful experiences, and only slowly learn to limit ourselves to narrow tastes. We are taught to lose our curiosity by the bludgeon-blows of mass marketing, which brainwash us to see "hits," and discourage exploration."

"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."

"The future of marketing belongs to honest information, accurate data and clear claims based on truth."

"There was no place for irony in marketing: it made people want to look for deeper meaning. There was no place in marketing for that, either."

"“Oh, let me guess,” Tina says. “He’s a marketer.” “Hi,” I say. …“I hope they pay you well for strangling the youth of this country with cultural conformity.”"