Advertising Quotes
Advertising is the art of arresting the human intelligence just long enough to get money from it.
— Chuck Blore, a partner in the advertising firm Chuck Blore & Don Ruchman, Inc., quoted by Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), p.185.
[T]he New York Times [is] a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. … You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations.
— Noam Chomsky, What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, Z Magazine, June 1997.
Protected by the free speech provision of the First Amendment, corporations marshal huge public relations efforts on behalf of their agendas. In the United States the 170,000 public relations employees whose job it is to manipulate news, public opinion and public policy in the interests of their clients outnumber news reporters by 40,000. A study in 1990 discovered that almost 40 percent of the news content of a typical U.S. newspaper originates as public relations press releases, story memos, and suggestions. The Columbia Journalism Review reported that more than half the news stories in the Wall Street Journal are based solely on corporate press releases (cited in Korten 1995:146 [When Corporations Rule the World]). United States corporations spend almost half as much on advertising (approximately $120 per person) as the state spends on education ($207 per person).
— Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999) p. 138
Cinema-goers will be familiar with product placement in films: those countless examples where the camera lingers just a little too long over a logo before shifting back to the main action. Now, more than 50 years after Hollywood wised up to the fact that companies will pay to have their brands featured within the narrative of a movie, advertisers have begun to extend the principle to formats such as books, pop songs, videos and computer games.
— Jonathan Duffy, Well Placed, BBC News Magazine, BBC, March 30, 2005