MANIPULATION
"A fundamental truth about advertising is that advertising agency people are not the ultimate decision-makers. As the advertising agency system functions today, they are the puppets, the manipulated. Nor is the advertiser as he sits astride the bleeding, panting agencyman the one who wields the whip in full command. The final control, the decisive power, is in your hands and under your command - if you will use it."
Samm Sinclair Baker, The Permissible Lie: The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, p. 6.
"Anyone who thinks that people can be fooled or pushed around has an inaccurate and pretty low estimate of people - and he won't do very well in advertising."
Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 86.
"Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation."
Marshall McLuhan, quoted in John Robert Colombo, The Dictionary of Canadian Quotations, 1991, Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd., p. 6.
"Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous."
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 138.
"Advertising is criticized on the ground that it can manipulate consumers to follow the will of the advertiser. The weight of evidence denies this ability. Instead, evidence supports the position that advertising, to be successful, must understand or anticipate basic human needs and wants and interpret available goods and services in terms of their want-satisfying abilities. This is the very opposite of manipulation."
Charles H. Sandage, "Some Institutional Aspects of Advertising," Journal of Advertising, 1972, vol. 1(1).
"Sixty percent of the newspaper space may be filled with advertising, but that advertising does not command sixty percent of the average reader's attention. We are inured to most of these advertisements and commercials; they wash over us without even dampening the skin. We often do not stop to even read or watch the ads at all, and when we do, they rarely penetrate or connect with our consciousness, let alone transform our identity. True, we are all persuaded and seduced from time to time by these ads, encouraged to make irrational impulsive consumer choices. But that kind of persuasion and seduction is endemic to social life; we run across it constantly and develop mechanisms to filter it out and fend it off."
Rodney A. Smolla, "Information, Imagery, and the First Amendment: A Case for Expansive Protection of Commercial Speech," 71 Texas Law Review 777 (1993), p. 797.
Advertising "degrades the people it appeals to; it deprives them of their will to choose."
C. P. Snow, quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 371.
"Although advertising is communication unusually candid about its motivation, Americans love to loathe it. As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of 'experts' become more annoying, more people are tepted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us,' using, among other dark arts, advertising."
George F. Will, syndicated columnist, "The Forbes Phenomenon: Should political communication be rationed?" Austin American-Statesman, January 26, 1996, p. A9.