“Successful advertising is not a science, but an art.” This quote from advertising guru David Ogilvy is just one of the many advertising quotes found in this article. In it you’ll find some of the best marketing and advertising quotes to help guide your current marketing efforts or inspire new ones. For example, “A brand has personality when people know what it stands for and can describe what makes it different.”
This blog post will teach you how to run successful advertising campaigns by utilizing these 31+ advertising quotes!
Marketing is a rough and tumble business. It takes years of experience to know what works and what doesn’t, but these advertising quotes have stood the test of time. Check out our collection for some marketing wisdom from advertising greats!
“If advertising is the price of entry to the game, advertising quotes will help you win.” What do these advertising quotes mean? Here are 31+ advertising quotes that can help you become a marketing genius. Learn from wise marketers and don’t forget to include keyword given in your opening paragraph!
Inspiring Advertising Quotes
- Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease. ~Author Unknown
- In general, my children refused to eat anything that hadn’t danced on TV. ~Erma Bombeck
- The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. ~Louis Kronenberger
- Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. ~Marshall McLuhan, introduction to Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction: Ad Media’s Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974
- Advertising is a bit like playing make-believe. ~Hartman Jule
- I have. Had a disturbing dream in which I break through a cave wall near Nag Hammadi and discover urns full of ancient Coptic scrolls. As I unfurl the first scroll, a subscription card to some Gnostic exercise magazine flutters out. ~Colin McEnroe
- Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement. ~Samuel Johnson
- Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn’t have to advertise it. ~Will Rogers
- History will see advertising “as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.” ~Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988
- Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths. ~Edgar A. Shoaff
10 Quotes About Advertising
- It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have. ~B. Earl Puckett, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992
- It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive. ~Nicholas Johnson
- Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. ~George Orwell
- When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded. ~Pat Brown, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985
- So long as there’s a jingle in your head, television isn’t free. ~Jason Love
- Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. ~J.B. Priestley
- The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial. ~Leonard Bernstein
- Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine. ~David Ogilvy
- The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. ~Bill Cosby
- Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. ~Stephen Butler Leacock
Famous Advertisers Quotes
- Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does. ~Steuart Henderson Britt
- Advertising is only another form of statistics. ~Hartman Jule
- Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle. ~Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell?, 1964
- If you don’t find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue. ~Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Consumer’s Guide, 1897
- Don’t tell my mother I work in an advertising agency – she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse. ~Jacques Seguela
- Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick. ~Samuel Johnson
- It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. ~R. Serling
- Our society’s values are being corrupted by advertising’s insistence on the equation: Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness. ~John Fisher, The Plot to Make You Buy, 1968
- What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public. ~Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 1964
- As advertising blather becomes the nation’s normal idiom, language becomes printed noise. ~George Will, quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations
- You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. ~Norman Douglas
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