A Commonplace Book

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

[on working for an ad agency writing ads for Chevrolet.] I had a lot of trouble with that. I could do truck ads, but I couldn't do convertibles at all.

Supermarket psychology, I have learned, is practically a science. It is governed by lab-tested principles and meticulous observation. Consultants churn out papers on such matters as unplanned purchasing and the effectiveness of shopping-cart signage.

The goal of all this effort is not, as one might guess, to improve the American diet. Nor is it to strike an ideal balance between nutrition, convenience and cost. The aim, seasoned observers inform me, is quite simple: It is to get the shopper to spend more money.

"The heart is a muscle," Bigend corrects. "You 'know' in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things."

Revolution will not be right back after
Pop-up ads about eCommerce, eTailers, or eContent.
You will not have to worry about a
Cookie in your browser, a bug in your email, or a
Worm in your recycling bin.
Revolution will not run faster with Intel inside.
Revolution, dude, is not getting a Dell.
Revolution will increase your Google rank.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword,
Is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will be no stream or download, dear Netizen;
Revolution must still be live.

Nothing had given a sense of beautiful passage as had the absence of signboards; without them, long stretches of the country appeared to us, if not pristine, then at least no worse the wear for half a millennium of explorers, settlers, descendants. The bullboard boys and others who see landscape only as a means to grab a fast buck without returning anything but ugliness have so degraded the view from so many American highways and so numbed us to the blight that we, especially the young, often silently accept the unslightly as a requisite of our economic lives and do nothing more than turn a blind eye to it.

Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat, not light, is the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.

Since so many minds are engaged in bringing about this condition of public helplessness, and since these programs of commercial education are so much more expensive and influential than the relatively puny offerings sponsored by schools and colleges, it seemed fitting to devise a method for reversing the process. Why not use the new commercial education as a means to enlighten its intended prey? Why not assist the public to observe consciously the drama which is intended to operate upon it subconsciously?"