SOCIAL POWER
"In the absence of traditional authority, advertising has become a kind of social guide. It depicts us in all the myriad situations possible to a life of free choice. It provides ideas about style, morality, behavior."
Ronald Berman, Advertising and Social Change (1981), Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, p. 13.
"All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level."
William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989), DDB Needham Worldwide.
"The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century."
Daniel J. Boorstin
"Sanely applied advertising could remake the world."
Stuart Chase
"Advertising is far from impotent or harmless; it is not a mere mirror image. Its power is real, and on the brink of a great increase. Not the power to brainwash overnight, but the power to create subtle and real change. The power to prevail."
Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 20.
"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), New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 117.
"If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!"
Jules Henry, Culture against Man (1963), New York: Random House, p. 76.
"Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor."
Clare Boothe Luce, quoted in Michael Jackman, Crown's Book of Political Quotations, 1982, New York: Crown Publishing Inc., p. 1.
"I don't think the advertisers have any real idea of their power not only to reflect but to mold society."
Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell? (1964), New York: Lippincott, p. 32.
"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness."
Marshall McLuhan (1964), Canadian communications theorist, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 19.
"Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them."
David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985, New York: Vintage Books, p. 26.
"The schools, government, and news media are all more powerful in shaping people's basic concepts of how the world operates and what kinds of lives are worth living. Still, advertising is a powerful cultural institution in this country (less so in other capitalist countries, though its presence is growing)."
Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. xix.
"If advertising was that powerful, then people would believe there's talking fruit in their underwear."
Dick Sittig, creative group head at Chiat/Day, quoted in Karen Stabiner, Inventing Desire (1993), New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 57.