INTRUSIVE
"Never before the advent of radio did advertising have such a golden opportunity to make an ass out of itself. Never before could advertising be so insistent and so unmannerly and so affront its audience."
William J. Cameron (1938), director of public relations for Ford Motor Company, quoted in Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, 1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 238-39.
"A good advertising man is a first-class pragmatist. If he has any basic theorem at all, it is that most advertising is an intrusion upon the time and attention of people; a justifiable one but an intrusion nonetheless. The reader has bought the magazine for something other than the ads . . . Therefore the copywriters undertake to stop him in spite of himself."
Albert Lynd, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.
"When executing advertising, it's best to think of yourself as an uninvited guest in the living room of a prospect who has the magical power to make you disappear instantly."
John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York: Chelsea House, p. 96.
"Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private. Commercial society finds unintelligible the idea that anything - an emotion, activity, or product - is too 'intimately personal' for uninhibited commercial treatment."
George Will (1975), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 71.