A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Advertising (82 quotes)
The fault is not in our stars but our jars that we are underlings.
Marshall McLuhan
“American Advertising”, published In Horizon, No.93-4, October (1947), reprinted in Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America,(1957); also reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #9 (2005), p 17
Year: 1947
Chapter:
Advertising
The public is a number which is not only expressed in curves but which is bombarded with curves.
The Mechanical Bride ,(1951), p 79
Year: 1951
Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.
Counterblast, (1969), p 18
Year: 1969
The present ad had a deadly aim. It voices the deadpan mutterings of a tribe of highly motivated somnambulists.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 18
Year: 1970
[T]he ad is taking the place of the product progressively; the ad is a substitute for the product. It is not intended to encourage you to go out and buy a product; it is intended to be a product; to give you all the satisfactions and more than you could ever get from the product. In fact it is the people who own that car, own that icebox, love that soap-whatever they own already- who read and watch ads, in order to get the right satisfaction. This is a simple dynamic within the information environment.
“Education in the Electronic Age”, in Interchange, Vol 1, No 4, (1970), p 3
Year: 1970
A kind of myth-making process is often associated with Hollywood and with Madison Avenue advertising agencies. So far as advertisements are concerned, they do, in intention at least, strive to comprise in a single image the total social action or process that is imagined as desirable. That is, an advertisement tries both to inform us about, and also to produce in us by anticipation, all the stages of a metamorphosis, private and social. So that whereas a myth might appear as the record of such extended metamorphosis, an advertisement proceeds by anticipation of change, simultaneously anticipating causes with effects and effects with causes. In myth this fusion and telescoping of phases of process becomes a kind of explanation or mode of intelligibility.
“Myth and Mass Media” (1960), in Media Research (1997), p 5
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Myth, Mythic
Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.
Counterblast, (1969), p 130
Year: 1969
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
“Preface”, in The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p unnumbered between v & vii
Year: 1951
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Drawn to McLuhan #8
[Of a Volkswagen ad] By the way, “volk” is German for “cloud.” The “folk” indicates a corporate tribal dream.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 32
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Retribalizing
It would seem that there is some sense of compulsion among the marketeers to assume the appearance of Little Red Riding Hood's granny. But this fear of detection is groundless.
“Freedom to listen”, in The Mechanical Bride, (1951) p 21
Year: 1951
Effective advertising gains its ends partly by distracting the attention of the reader from its presuppositions and by its quiet fusion with other levels of experience.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 82
Year: 1951
What happens when the ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry? Are ads themselves the main form of industrial culture?
“Freedom-American Style” in The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 117
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Questions He Asks
An immediate consequence of the moral disapproval felt both inside and outside the ad agencies has been the militant do-gooder response of the ad men. They argue that advertising is geared to industrial production, and is really a means of applying its benefits to the mass market. Advertising, therefore, is good because it is a social instrument for raising the general standard of living.
“Advertising as a Magical Institution” from The Commerce Journal, Toronto, (1952), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 17
Year: 1952
The craving for intense individuality and attention merges with the opposite extreme of security through uniformity.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 96
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Individual
What is urgently needed is a study of the relation of advertising to other techniques of communication in an industrial society.
“Advertising as a Magical Institution” from The Commerce Journal, Toronto, (1952), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 18
Year: 1952
How many kiddies have gagged manfully over an extra dish of something that is advertised to be the breakfast of champions.
“Baseball Is Culture,” in CBC Times, text of a talk given on the radio show, “CBC Wednesday Night” September 24, 1952, printed transcript, p 2
Year: 1952
[Referring to David Ogilvy’s famous man-in-an-eyepatch] This advertisement sold a million Hathaway shirts in a few weeks, but few ever found out why. The ad was a piece of abstract art, of unabashed symbolism such as is reputed to outrage the ordinary man when he meets it in an art gallery, but which worked perfectly in the market place.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 555
Year: 1953
Today advertising, is a major industry, absorbing most of the artistic talent of our world. But the hook-up between artists and advertising is age-old.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 555
Year: 1953
To use a brand of car, drink, smoke, or food that is nationally advertised gives a man the feeling that he belongs to something bigger than himself.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 555
Year: 1953
In America the lay-out and design man for an ad might be a very great artist and nobody would ever discover it.
“The Age of Advertising", in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 555- 556
Year: 1953
Of course, nothing kills the power of an ad like paying conscious attention to it.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 556
Year: 1953
[Advertising] subtly rearranges the pattern of our wishes and impulses like dinner music, the smell of cooking, or the sound of the surf. Today our whole society is reeling from copy-writer’s shock as much as any soldier ever felt battle-shock.
“The Age of Advertising”, Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
Ads are like the weird faces or masks used by witch-doctors to control the powers of nature. If one is merged in the tribal horde, that mask will look good to him. It may decide whether he will eat next year. To the outsider the same magical layout will seem comical.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
But the business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
Our own advertising layouts are so extremely funny that if we paid any serious attention to them we would soon be in stitches of laughter.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
The important point about ads and fashions can be stated in a word. Fashion is the popular substitute for art. It is a constantly applied stimulus to our natural sluggishness. A kind of social tonic. From this point of view fashion is the life-blood of advertising.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
Ads are written to have their effect on those whose attention is distracted by the other items around them. And no ad has its meaning by itself. Anybody can prove this simply but putting one of out of a magazine and studying it, or by stopping and looking carefully at one. Soon he will begin to smile.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
Our social culture today is even at the intellectual level, mainly an affair of advertising.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
Decision-making in business and in education as much as in diplomacy is now a matter of grasping these configurations. They have a language and a syntax of their own as much as does the iconology of pictorial advertisement, so that it is not only the business of education today to teach these new languages, but to teach how we can in our previously achieved configurations of culture be enriched by these new powers and not merely dissolved by them.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 5
Year: 1959
It is a matter of "rite words in rote order", as Joyce put it. But once more any Western child today grows up in this kind of magical repetitive world as he hears advertisements on radio and TV.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 11
Year: 1962
The newspaper that could advertise every sort of product on one page quickly gave rise to the department store that provided every kind of product under one roof.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 200
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Living Unity
A few months ago an American army officer wrote for Printer's Ink from Italy. He noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political rather than commercial slogans. Finally, he predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes or cigarettes rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying about the means of defeating underarm odour, scaly scalp, hairy legs, dull complexion, unruly hair, borderline anemia, athlete's foot, and sluggish bowels, not to mention ferro nutritional deficiency of the blood, wash-day blues, saggy breasts, receding gums, shiny pants, greying hair, and excess weight. Here we are perhaps in the presence of an excluded middle rather than a non sequitur, because American advertising has developed into a jungle of folklore beside which the tales from the Schwartzwald belong with Winnie-the-Pooh.
“American Advertising”, published In Horizon, No.93-4, October (1947), reprinted in Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America,(1957), reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #9 (2005), p 5-6
Year: 1947
At any rate, the multi-billion dollar, nation-wide educational programmes of the ad-men (dwarfing the outlay on formal education) provide a world of symbols, witticism, and behaviour patterns which may or may not be a fatal solvent for the basic political traditions of America, but which certainly do comprise a common experience and a common language for a country whose sectional differences and technological specialisms might easily develop into anarchy.
“American Advertising”, published In Horizon, No.93-4, October (1947), reprinted in Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America,(1957), reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #9 (2005), p 6
Year: 1947
In this respect, the American is in a much happier position than the Englishman whose advertisements are such half-hearted and apologetic attempts to externalize his hopes and fears and appetites; American advertising is Cartesian; the English is Baconian; the American responds to showmanship, clarity of layout and distinctness of formulation; the Englishman, to judge by his ads (and I have some scores by me, collected in England over a period of three years), in his timid concern for demure good form falls into the empirical bog of self-defensive puns, archness, and snob-appeal; the American ad-men put on a decisively superior show and provide the analyst with a much greater variety of lively game; but to establish a national pre-eminence in this province is not to make more general claims.
“American Advertising”, published In Horizon, No.93-4, October (1947), reprinted in Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America,(1957), reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #9 (2005), p 10
Year: 1947
Recently, with much public irritation being expressed at the blatancy, duration and frequency of radio commercials, careful tests have been made to determine the effect on the market. The result has been the discovery that irritation has great "attention-getting power" and that those irritated in this respect are reliable customers. Nausea has, therefore, become a new principle of commercial dynamics as of esthetics.
“American Advertising”, published In Horizon, No.93-4, October (1947), reprinted in Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America,(1957), reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #9 (2005), p 14
Year: 1947
Should the energy which activates the ad-men (and the industrial stalks on which they are the passion-flowers) be transferred to the world of political speculation and creation, American could still fulfill many of its broken Utopian promises, because its Jeffersonian tradition is still intact, and likewise its psychological vigor.
“American Advertising”, published In Horizon, No.93-4, October (1947), reprinted in Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America,(1957), reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #9 (2005), p 18
Year: 1947
Chapter:
America, North America
Since [1910] the word has been used to effect a universal hypnosis. How are words to be used to unweave the spell of print? Of radio commercials and news-“casts”? I’m working on that problem.
Letter to Ezra Pound, June 22, 1951, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 227
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Wake Them Up!
RE David Ogilvy’s famous man-in-an-eyepatch] This advertisement sold a million Hathaway shirts in a few weeks, but few ever found out why. The ad was a piece of abstract art, of unabashed symbolism such as is reputed to outrage the ordinary man when he meets it in an art gallery, but which worked perfectly in the market place.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 555
Year: 1953
Advertisers pay for space and time in paper and magazine, on radio and TV; that is, they buy a piece of the reader, listener, or viewer as definitely as if they hired our homes for a public meeting. They would gladly pay the reader, listener, or viewer directly for his time and attention if they knew how to do so. The only way so far devised is to put on a free show.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 207
Year: 1964
The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 210
Year: 1964
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 228
Year: 1964
That is certainly what advertising does. Instead of presenting a private argument or vista, it offers a way of life that is for everybody or nobody. It offers this prospect with arguments that concern only irrelevant and trivial matters.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 230-231
Year: 1964
Those who have spent their lives protesting about "false and misleading ad copy" are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 231
Year: 1964
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 232
Year: 1964
The hullabaloo Madison Avenue creates couldn't condition a mouse.
“Understanding McLuhan”, in Newsweek Magazine, February 28, (1966), p 56
Year: 1966
One of the things that puzzles many people about our world of advertising is that there seems to be such a strange disproportion between the effect of the ad and the content.
The Medium Is the Massage, (1967), p 95
Year: 1967
The world of modern advertising is a magical environment constructed to maintain the economy, not to increase human awareness.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 243
Year: 1968
Advertising is a very considerable part of our total culture. It is not separable from any of the other activities of our world. It is quite idle to examine it in isolation. Current advertising is environmental and total. The Greek word for this is perivallo – to strike from all sides. This is stunning. Joyce calls it “astoneagement”. Advertising is like cave art, not intending to be seen but expected to exercise a magical influence on the outside world. Ads pictorialize Bergson’s elan vital, what Joyce refers to as “a burning would has come to dance inane.” The invincible irrationality is again “Willed without witting, whirled without aimed.”
“Letter to Professor J. Kennedy and group”, August 15, (1968), LAC
Year: 1968
Why do you think people would rather read bad news in the newspaper, which is all advertising? Advertising is always demanding that you change.
“McLuhan Dazzles Graduates”, Commencement address to St. John Fisher College, printed in Tower Chronicle and Fisher Bulletin, (1969), p 29
Year: 1969
The cave art of Madison Avenue has been by far the most innovative and educative art form of the twentieth century.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 48
Year: 1970
“School is the advertising agency, which makes you believe you need the society as it is.” -Ivan Illich
Deschooling Society, New York: Harper and Row (1971), p 48
Year: 1971
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. But environments as such have a way of being inaccessible to inspection. Environments by reason of their total character are mostly subliminal to ordinary experience. Indeed, the amount of any situation, private or social, verbal or geographic, that can be raised and held to the conscious level of attention is almost insignificant.
McLuhan's Introduction to Subliminal Seduction by Brian Wilson Key (1973), reprinted in Theories of Communication with Eric McLuhan, 2011, p 112
Year: 1973
The soul of advertising," said Dr. Johnson, "is a large promise." Advertising is the garment of abundance, a massive put-on that is itself the source of many of the satisfactions we create for ourselves, as illustrated in the slogan: "You feel better satisfied when you use well-known brands."
“Media and the Inflation CROWD” (1973), reprinted in Marshall McLuhan: the Man and His Message (1989), pp 60-61
Year: 1973
Like our money, which is a "promise to pay", our advertising and P.R. only promise to pay promises.
“Foreword”, in Abortion in Perspective: The Rose Palace or the Fiery Dragon”, (1974), p iv
Year: 1974
Even movie people don't have to study their medium that closely. Because in most movies they are very, very vague about the sort of effect they want. Big boys like Bergman are artists who understand effects. They don't just make pictures. They know the effect they want before they start. Advertising men know the effect they want before they start - they want sales. That's why the art of advertising is the greatest art form in the world. The advertisement, because of its concern for effect and its understanding of the media for the getting of that effect, is the greatest art form there is. Years from now the advertising of our century will be studied by all the great art experts. They will be saying, "Oh boy, that artist was totally unknown, anonymous and ignored all his life. He was one of the greatest guys who ever lived."
“CONVERSATION WITH MARSHALL MCLUHAN”, Howard Polskin Interview in Videography ,October (1977), p 61
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Movies
It will do no harm to modern literary and editorial practitioners to confront the fact that the ads have long surpassed them in respect to providing pleasure, amusement and distraction.
“Advertising as a Magical Institution” from The Commerce Journal, Toronto, (1952), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 19
Year: 1952
Modern advertising is a world of ideograms.
“Technology and Political Change,” International Journal, Vol 7, No. 3, Summer, (1952), p 192 (page number on reprint on file)
Year: 1952
[Advertising] has created a world in which everyone wants to be hep - "How'm I doin'?" It represents an enormous levelling process from which nobody is excluded.
“The Age of Advertising”, in Commonweal, September 11, (1953), Vol. 58, No. 23, p 557
Year: 1953
It is, therefore, quite possible that there is a core of political reality and even health in the wildly proliferating forms of American advertising.
“The Medium Is the Message” (1960), reprinted in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 13
Year: 1960
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.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 227
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Corporate Consciousness
The objective of advertising is the manipulation, exploitation, and control of the individual.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 21
Year: 1951
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf. "Freedom to Listen," in a world where effective expression via newspaper or radio is reserved only for a tiny minority, is freedom to put up or shut up.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 21
Year: 1951
Electric persuasion by photo and movie and TV works, instead, by dunking entire populations in new imagery. Full awareness of this technological change had dawned on Madison Avenue ten years ago when it shifted its tactics from the promotion of the individual product to the collective involvement in the "corporate image," now altered to "corporate posture."
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 339
Year: 1964
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
“McLuhan rides again”, in Macleans, May (1977), p 23
Year: 1977
Any expensive ad is as carefully built on the tested foundations of public stereotypes or "sets" of established attitudes, as any skyscraper is built on bedrock.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 228
Year: 1964
With more and more products competing for attention, you need a selling medium with dramatic impact - films. And films are ready.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 90
Year: 1951
The corporate image is the most involving of effects for it is really made up of public attitudes.
“Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age,” (1968), p 78
Year: 1968
These magazines, carefully geared to both the purse and heartstrings of their respective reader groups, feature houses and rooms in which almost nobody ever lives-certainly not the readers.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 112
Year: 1951
Nobody has to be told that people who crave to be held tight, whether in somebody's arms or in a "foundation garment," are looking for extra security. And one of the paradoxes of modern feminine attire is the strange mixture of brevity and rigidity.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 152
Year: 1951
The steady trend in advertising is to manifest the product as an integral part of large social purposes and processes. With very large budgets the commercial artists have tended to develop the ad into an icon, and icons are not specialist fragments or aspects but unified and compressed images of [a] complex kind.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 226
Year: 1964
Like symbolic poetry, the present ad works by suggestion, not statement.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 180
Year: 1970
Advertising can be regarded as a profoundly important art form, but it is not private self-expression.
“Television in a New Light,” in The Meaning of Commercial Television (1966), p 97
Year: 1966
Remember, an artist is primarily concerned with getting your attention, whether he’s a musician or a poet. His first wish and hope is to trap your attention. This is the first hope and wish of every advertiser; he is an artist, certainly, to that extent. He wants to shape your attention, to shape your sensibilities, to create an effect upon you. Whether you believe a word he says couldn’t matter less to him; he is interested only in effects, and not in changing your opinions or thoughts about anything. And this is also true of the poet: he couldn’t care less what you thought or felt about him or anything, as long as he gets his effects across.
Audio clip of McLuhan speaking, used in an unidentified radio recording, interview of Barrington Nevitt and Father John Culkin, S.J., shortly after Marshall McLuhan’s funeral, January, 1981. Transcript of the radio broadcast, p 9
Year: 1981
Advertising got into high gear only at the end of the last century, with the invention of photoengraving. Ads and pictures then became interchangeable and have continued so.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 230
Year: 1964
With TV, the smarter advertisers have made free with fur and fuzz, and blur and buzz.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 233
Year: 1964
Advertising is substituting for product, because the consumer today gets his satisfaction from the ad, not the product. This is only beginning.
“Television in a New Light” in The Meaning of Commercial Television (1966), p 104
Year: 1966
The fact to learn is that advertising is a service industry that provides its satisfactions quite independent of the product and that people are increasingly tending to get their satisfactions from the ad rather than the product.
“Like Yoga Not Like the Movies,” in Forbes magazine, March 15, (1967), p 40
Year: 1967
Modern advertising is more and more a substitute for the product. Because of its rich resources and means of sensuous solicitation, modern advertising can give you the effect of almost anything without your having to bother about having the thing at all.
The Medium is the Massage, (1967), p 95
Year: 1967
In terms of auditory magic, the power of giving the effect without the thing is entirely within his domain. Advertisers have been puzzled for a long time in their surveys to discover that people don't really read ads until they own the thing. If you own that icebox or that car, then you notice the ads very much because this is how you get your satisfaction.
The Medium is the Massage, (1967), p 96
Year: 1967
La Nausee [by Sartre] reads like a B.O. ad.
Letter to Felix Giovanelli, May 8, 1945 [LAC]
Year: 1945
“Keeping Upset with the Joneses” -- subtitle of the chapter on Ads in Understanding Media.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 226
Year: 1964