[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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Our social culture today is even at the intellectual level, mainly an affair of advertising.

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

[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 audience is the speaker. The audience is the actor… Eliot explains this matter apropos Tiresias in his “notes” to the Waste Land.

Apart from that simple requirement, nothing could be nothing could be more democratic than our fashions which require uniformity as the mark of distinction.

Because the ads have created a world in which fashion dictates that each of us must always have enough cash to conform, success is the cash-ability to be like everybody else. Our fashions change rapidly so that to be in fashion takes a great deal of ready money.