The End of Advertising Quotes

“This is the lesson advertisers must follow to add value in the future. What we need is better content from brands, and not just product placement, which screams of inauthenticity.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

“They’d become genuine storytellers, and put themselves at the center of the story.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

“repeatedly despite my feeble protestations. I would soon discover—perhaps the last person in America to do so—that this film was part of an entire ecosystem—books, clothes, jewelry, accessories—designed to support the launch of a new doll named, you guessed it, McKenna.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

“Vine, the Ringling Brothers circus, Friendster, horseshoes, pay phones, typewriters, etc. Things go out of business. Don't think it can't happen to Madison Avenue. Adapt or die.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

“Among the more pleasing by-products of the coming end of advertising is a heretical realization among some industry thinkers: the idea that for advertising to survive, or rather to thrive, it must add value to people's lives. In a world in which lazy, superfluous, and stupid no longer cut it, advertising will have no choice but to compete as primary content, not secondary intrusion. It will become the thing, not the thing that sells the thing.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

“The most important thing is to be excellent, interesting, authentic, or useful. To be the thing, not the thing that sells the thing. That's fantastic news for creative people, who specialize in the stuff. Thanks to toomuchness, creativity, once exclusively the province of poets, has suddenly become a business imperative.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

“Young people, not to mention people of all ages, really, really don't like being annoyed. And ads, almost always, were annoying. There is nothing beautiful, let alone useful, not to mention authentic, about being interrupted, distracted, or annoyed by something you didn't choose to see.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

“It's rarely pointed out, even though it's so obvious, that the artistic triumph of the small screen has paradoxically come at the expense of advertising.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

“Many of us were raised to think of abundance as something desirable. The cornucopia, the horn of plenty, the allure of inexhaustible gifts. In practice, however…well…be careful what you wish for. Once we shifted the collective locus of our attention to smaller and smaller screens, abundance was no longer as appealing, and needless clutter became the enemy of useful content.”
― Andrew Essex, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come