I have always believed that advertising is the favourite punching bag of everyone. My uncle, your aunt, her granny, his mistress, that one’s maid, next door neighbour’s driver…everyone has an opinion on an ad. Like it, love it, hate it, adore it…advertising as a profession has through the ages had many critics and critiques. After all it is not called the world’s second oldest profession for nothing. Even Confucius had, in my opinion unwittingly commented on the same. Read on to see what historians, authors, philosophers, economists etc had to say about advertising. In no particular order or preference.

The naysayers
Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease- George Orwell, author.
The real lie that advertising tells is not so much in what it shows, but in what it leaves out- Stefano Beni, Italian satirical writer, poet & journalist.
Advertising, a judicious mixture of flattery and threats- Stephen Leacock, author.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better- George Santayana, philosopher.
There’s no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid- Carl Sagan, astronomer.
Advertising departments, as you know, are crawling with people whose frontal lobes are so underdeveloped that if you flatter them a bit they'll swear shit is platinum- Ryu Murakami, novelist, filmmaker.
Gatekeepers and people that work in marketing are suckling pigs at the helm of Satan’s phallus. They are the death of art, and ultimately the death of the human spirit- Paul Huhn, author.
Advertising is not only the graffiti on our streets, but also the graffiti that tags the surface of our malleable minds- L.V. Hall, author
Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don`t need, with money they don`t have, in order to impress others who don`t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today- Victor Papanek, designer, teacher.
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money- G.K.Chesterton, author, journalist.
If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism--the single greatest source of its waning morality--I should without hesitation name advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose--say the exaltation of the public sector--it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions- Robert. L. Hellbroner, economist.
Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission- Fred Allen, comedian.


The definers
The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope.

We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry. – Aldous Huxley, writer.
Advertising is to a genuine article what manure is to land, - it largely increases the product –P.T. Barnum- Showman, businessman, author, philanthropist
The believers
The codfish lays ten thousand eggs. The homely hen lays one. Codfish never cackles to tell you what she has done. And so we scorn the codfish, while the humble hen we prize, which only goes to show you that it pays to advertise!- Nikhil Sharda, writer, filmmaker.
You could write the best book in the world but if nobody knows about it, it is nothing- Brendon Reece Taylor, author.
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does- Steuart Henderson Britt, historian, culture critic,musician.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising- Mark Twain, author.
You don't sell the product, you sell the philosophy. When you sell a product, you have customers, when you sell a philosophy, you have believers- Soumeet Lanka, writer.
The alluders
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell- Confucious, philosopher.
Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists- Sara Sheridan, writer.
Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do…-George Lois, art director.
The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it
- Neil Postman, author, media theorist.