1,265 Quotes About Advertising

I've often wondered what would happen if, in the interest of public service, advertising companies lent out their best copywriters for a year or so to team up with teachers in designing educational materials.

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual--and hence social--confidence while undermining that of women.

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

Advertisement shouldn’t look like information, it should look like a promise.

In the ad, this better version of me is sitting in her apartment watching TV, just like I am now, only her apartment is obviously much nicer than mine. For authenticity they even have a pizza box open on the table, even though this girl only eats seven almonds a week. Her world is black and white, which seems intended as a signal for depression but actually makes her look like she's in a cool French movie...