Concluding 2005 Books
And Now a Few Words from Me:
Advertising’s Leading Critic Lays down the Law Once and for All
- Bob Garfield
- As one might expect from the title, this Bob Garfield is pretty full of himself. So much so that it was difficult to wade through the introduction to the book. However, it was a fun book to read, with lots of humour, lots of quotable lines, and very enjoyable on the whole. Is it something important that everyone should read? No. Do I recommend it for its Fun Factor? Absolutely.
- Quotes and Excerpts:
It is easy to be wrong when you’re cloistered on the inside with like-minded, like-blinded people.
“Thumbs-up” soon loses its meaning if there is no possibility for “Thumbs-down”.
Weekly water torture / Full immersion / No wonder I drink
As Moses discovered the hard way, the prophet business is a bitch… from this day forward, nobody can blame me. I’ve put in my forty days and forty nights and then some. At this point all I can do is pray.
Mindless corporate automatons… don’t like being portrayed as mindless corporate automatons.
…those spots invoked sexuality not because it corresponded with the product or the promise but because the people behind the advertising didn’t have any real ideas… attention getting was mistaken for a goal… As the drunken party buffoon who puts the lampshade on his head knows… attention in and of itself doesn’t win friends. There is no point in getting everybody’s attention if you have nothing to offer once you have it. What people do then is just nervously edge away.
…it’s a preposterous, incendiary, and ultimately counter-productive overstatement - but it doesn’t come from nothing.
Many critics… believe advertising generally to be a malignant cancer in the culture. Jean Kilbourne writes that “all ads, in addition to selling products, sell us the idea that buying things can make us happy, that products can fulfill us and meet our deepest human needs.”
…society is clearly reevaluating, and the current consensus is that sexual correctness is a futile exercise in denial.
Advertising must amuse, seduce, entertain, or otherwise enthrall viewers… but what amuses, seduces, entertains, and enthralls me, or you,… is apt to be very different from what amuses, seduces, entertains, and enthralls Wanda and Darryl and the exactly 50 percent of the consuming public who are stupider than average.
Bear in mind that you must impress the target audience even if… the target audience doesn’t impress you.
Do not be so blindly determined to think outside the box, that you are constructing your own coffins.
Exactly the kind of artiness… that makes people hate art
The (something, something) wasn’t a terrible idea. The charge of the Light Brigade, that was a terrible idea. The Watergate break-in was a terrible idea.
The (something, something) was a satisfactory idea, executed terribly - like the O. J. Simpson prosecution.
Are you so lost in the funhouse of the production process, too pumped full of creative adrenaline, to see how your elaborate dream might materialize as… the client’s worst nightmare?
Nobody in the eventual audience will care about how complicated and exciting the project was.
Please Note: Satan is a household name. Its just that nobody wants to do business with him.
…advice they give roofers and iron workers. You’ve got to feel comfortable up there, or else you’ll fall. But you can’t feel too comfortable, or else you’ll forget where you are, and you’ll fall.
The result was unforgettable, in approximately the way passing a kidney stone is unforgettable.
There is a difference between facts and truth… the parts may be themselves true, but the whole is a filthy, preposterous, reckless, cynical, shameless, damnable lie. It is also standard operating procedure in political campaigns, run by opportunistic dirty tricksters such as would make Machiavelli blush.
… using small facts to tell the Big Lie
… why be simply compelling when you can play on the emotions of a traumatized society and fashion yourself a corporate hero? What does simple human decency have to do with it? You are General Motors. You are Ford. The sacred burial grounds of September 11 are yours to trample, hoisting the flag, desecrating the victims, for the holy purpose of moving the merchandise. The terrorists strike. You conquer. My God, will there ever be a reckoning?
It’s a very “Drink the Kool-Aid” kind of place
Yo, Madge, you cackling harpie, go to hell… We’re not merely exposed to TV advertising, we’re soaking in it… Factor in… its overarching incitement to mindless consumption, and one can easily see how … the “Advertising Century” can be written off as a sorry display of capitalist excess, a toxic by-product of the Information Age.
If advertising were nothing else, it would be valuable as the Rosetta stone of the consumer society.
Fire. The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine. Antibiotics. The integrated circuit. Digitization. TV is on the short list of innovations that changed humankind, and this one was on Madge’s dime. Indeed, one can posit a powerful argument that the TV signal - both the programming and advertising it carried - changed the world in a quite specific way by substantially undermining the Communist bloc. The Iron Curtain could keep people in, but it couldn’t keep the news of the consumer society out. When, through broadcast and video, people in the East realized what was being advertised and purchased in the West, the fraud of Marxist rhetoric was at last all too evident.
Advertising’s Leading Critic Lays down the Law Once and for All
- Bob Garfield
- As one might expect from the title, this Bob Garfield is pretty full of himself. So much so that it was difficult to wade through the introduction to the book. However, it was a fun book to read, with lots of humour, lots of quotable lines, and very enjoyable on the whole. Is it something important that everyone should read? No. Do I recommend it for its Fun Factor? Absolutely.
- Quotes and Excerpts:
It is easy to be wrong when you’re cloistered on the inside with like-minded, like-blinded people.
“Thumbs-up” soon loses its meaning if there is no possibility for “Thumbs-down”.
Weekly water torture / Full immersion / No wonder I drink
As Moses discovered the hard way, the prophet business is a bitch… from this day forward, nobody can blame me. I’ve put in my forty days and forty nights and then some. At this point all I can do is pray.
Mindless corporate automatons… don’t like being portrayed as mindless corporate automatons.
…those spots invoked sexuality not because it corresponded with the product or the promise but because the people behind the advertising didn’t have any real ideas… attention getting was mistaken for a goal… As the drunken party buffoon who puts the lampshade on his head knows… attention in and of itself doesn’t win friends. There is no point in getting everybody’s attention if you have nothing to offer once you have it. What people do then is just nervously edge away.
…it’s a preposterous, incendiary, and ultimately counter-productive overstatement - but it doesn’t come from nothing.
Many critics… believe advertising generally to be a malignant cancer in the culture. Jean Kilbourne writes that “all ads, in addition to selling products, sell us the idea that buying things can make us happy, that products can fulfill us and meet our deepest human needs.”
…society is clearly reevaluating, and the current consensus is that sexual correctness is a futile exercise in denial.
Advertising must amuse, seduce, entertain, or otherwise enthrall viewers… but what amuses, seduces, entertains, and enthralls me, or you,… is apt to be very different from what amuses, seduces, entertains, and enthralls Wanda and Darryl and the exactly 50 percent of the consuming public who are stupider than average.
Bear in mind that you must impress the target audience even if… the target audience doesn’t impress you.
Do not be so blindly determined to think outside the box, that you are constructing your own coffins.
Exactly the kind of artiness… that makes people hate art
The (something, something) wasn’t a terrible idea. The charge of the Light Brigade, that was a terrible idea. The Watergate break-in was a terrible idea.
The (something, something) was a satisfactory idea, executed terribly - like the O. J. Simpson prosecution.
Are you so lost in the funhouse of the production process, too pumped full of creative adrenaline, to see how your elaborate dream might materialize as… the client’s worst nightmare?
Nobody in the eventual audience will care about how complicated and exciting the project was.
Please Note: Satan is a household name. Its just that nobody wants to do business with him.
…advice they give roofers and iron workers. You’ve got to feel comfortable up there, or else you’ll fall. But you can’t feel too comfortable, or else you’ll forget where you are, and you’ll fall.
The result was unforgettable, in approximately the way passing a kidney stone is unforgettable.
There is a difference between facts and truth… the parts may be themselves true, but the whole is a filthy, preposterous, reckless, cynical, shameless, damnable lie. It is also standard operating procedure in political campaigns, run by opportunistic dirty tricksters such as would make Machiavelli blush.
… using small facts to tell the Big Lie
… why be simply compelling when you can play on the emotions of a traumatized society and fashion yourself a corporate hero? What does simple human decency have to do with it? You are General Motors. You are Ford. The sacred burial grounds of September 11 are yours to trample, hoisting the flag, desecrating the victims, for the holy purpose of moving the merchandise. The terrorists strike. You conquer. My God, will there ever be a reckoning?
It’s a very “Drink the Kool-Aid” kind of place
Yo, Madge, you cackling harpie, go to hell… We’re not merely exposed to TV advertising, we’re soaking in it… Factor in… its overarching incitement to mindless consumption, and one can easily see how … the “Advertising Century” can be written off as a sorry display of capitalist excess, a toxic by-product of the Information Age.
If advertising were nothing else, it would be valuable as the Rosetta stone of the consumer society.
Fire. The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine. Antibiotics. The integrated circuit. Digitization. TV is on the short list of innovations that changed humankind, and this one was on Madge’s dime. Indeed, one can posit a powerful argument that the TV signal - both the programming and advertising it carried - changed the world in a quite specific way by substantially undermining the Communist bloc. The Iron Curtain could keep people in, but it couldn’t keep the news of the consumer society out. When, through broadcast and video, people in the East realized what was being advertised and purchased in the West, the fraud of Marxist rhetoric was at last all too evident.