Advertising Small Quotes

The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

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.

A loose definition of the Tea Party might be fifteen million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the small handful of banks and investment companies who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren

A market research project starts when you have the answers to the following questions: 1. Why are you researching? 2. What are you going to do with the results?

Having an objective for any project is highly important as we are living in a world full of data—some useful but mostly useless.

For identifying the objective of your market research project, it is highly advisable that you should zero in on the exact information you want to collect and from who.

If you are going to use the results of market research to make a big business decision, then it’s a good idea to do quantitative research rather than qualitative.

The more numbers you know through market research, the more you will be able to cut down your business risk.

The biggest advice I can give for setting up your market research objectives is to be very clear and concise.

One market research project should have only one objective. More than one objective can affect the effectiveness of your research.

Never guess anything. You will make bad business decisions if you do that. If you don’t have data on something, start a research project on that topic.

Your market research objectives need to fit into your marketing strategy. If your objectives are not supporting your marketing strategy, then it’s going to be a waste of your resources.

To save ourselves from getting lost in this sea of data and ending up directionless, it becomes vital for every business owner to not just set up their market research objectives but also to stick to those.

No one has to know until we adopt in a few years. I’m sure there are loads of damn babies waiting for parents to buy them. We will be fine.” I know she hasn’t accepted my offer of marriage, or even being in a relationship with me, but I hope she doesn’t use this opportunity to remind me of that. She laughs softly. “Damn babies? Please tell me you don’t think there is a store somewhere downtown where you walk in and purchase a baby?” She lifts her hand to her mouth to stop herself from laughing at me. “There isn’t?” I joke. “What’s Babies ‘R’ Us, then?” “Oh my goodness!” She tilts her head back in laughter. I reach across the small space between us and grab hold of her hand. “If that damn store isn’t full of babies, lined up, ready for purchase, than I’m suing for false advertisement.

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment. If you were an eighteen-year-old youth in a small village 5,000 years ago you’d probably think you were good-looking because there were only fifty other men in your village and most of them were either old, scarred and wrinkled, or still little kids. But if you are a teenager today you are a lot more likely to feel inadequate. Even if the other guys at school are an ugly lot, you don’t measure yourself against them but against the movie stars, athletes and supermodels you see all day on television, Facebook and giant billboards.

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us. We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small fraction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation. To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.

The Americans are the nature of the future," she would announce in her hearty voice. "Here's to 'em. God bless their gadgets, great and small, God bless Frigidaire, Tampax and Coca-Cola. Yes, even Coca-Cola,darling." (It was generally conceded that Coca-Cola's advertising was ruining the picturesqueness of Morocco.)

If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.

The Best Marketing Is Education!

That paper-- it sits there, open at the employment section. It sits there like a war, and each small advertisement is another trench for a person to dive into. To hope and fight in.

The growing policy-reform movement is a broad church. It includes everyone from ganja-smoking Rastafarians to free-market fundamentalists and all in between. There are socialists who think the drug war hurts the poor, capitalists who see a business opportunity, liberals who defend the right to choose, and fiscal conservatives who complain America is spending $40 billion a year on the War on Drugs rather than making a few billion taxing it. The movement can’t agree on much other than that the present policy doesn’t work. People disagree on whether legalized drugs should be controlled by the state, by corporations, by small businessmen, or by grow-your-own farmers, and on whether they should be advertised, taxed, or just handed out free in white boxes to addicts.

But if lifestyle ads work by the third-person effect, then there will be some products for which it makes good business sense to target a wider audience, one that includes both buyers and non-buyers.32 One reason to target non-buyers is to create envy. As Miller argues, this is the case for many luxury products. “Most BMW ads,” he says, “are not really aimed so much at potential BMW buyers as they are at potential BMW coveters.”33 When BMW advertises during popular TV shows or in mass-circulation magazines, only a small fraction of the audience can actually afford a BMW. But the goal is to reinforce for non-buyers the idea that BMW is a luxury brand.

To give the devil its due, ours is the best Age men ever lived in; we are all more comfortable and virtuous than we ever were; we have many new accomplishments, advertisements in green pastures, telephones in bedrooms, more newspapers than we want to read, and extremely punctilious diagnosis of maladies. A doctor examined a young lady the other day, and among his notes were there: ‘Not afraid of small rooms, ghosts, or thunderstorms – not made drunk by hearing Wagner; brown hair, artistic hands; had a craving for chocolate in 1918.

Twirling the breeze like it's cotton candy, I'm not the one they marry- Every thirsty Thursday and drowned Sunday, I collect them all and carry The gypsy heart is too romanticized; Whispers that scream down your spine Never the Hellfire pain that's advertised, only dancing with the wine

If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers' behaviour becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. One technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbiotic relationships among technologies themselves.

When religions advertise themselves, they tend to emphasise their beautiful values. But God often hides in the small print of factual statements.

zippy new tax called VAT, which was to be introduced a week or so later. The gist of the advertisement was that while some things would go up in price with VAT, some things would also go down. (Ha!) I

They gathered around the living room TV and the media woman plugged a thumb drive into the digital port and brought the advertisement up: Smalls was dressed in a gray pin-striped suit, bankerish, but with a pale blue shirt open at the collar. He was in his Minnesota Senate office, with a hint of the American flag to his right, a couple of red and white stripes—not enough of a flag display to invite sarcasm, but it was there.

The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause. A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally. Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site. When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas. With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something. This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.

Don’t be like a salesman who wears conspicuous clothes. The small percentage he appeals to are not usually good buyers. The great majority of the sane and thrifty heartily despise him. Be normal in everything you do when you are seeking confidence and conviction

The charm of a city, now we come to it, is not unlike the charm of flowers. It partly depends on seeing time creep across it. Charm needs to be fleeting. Nothing could be less palatable than a museum-city propped up by prosthetic devices of concrete. Paris is not in danger of becoming a museum-city, thanks to the restlessness and greed of promoters. Yet their frenzy to demolish everything is less objectionable than their clumsy determination to raise housing projects that cannot function without the constant presence of an armed police force… All these banks, all these glass buildings, all these mirrored facades are the mark of a reflected image. You can no longer see what’s happening inside, you become afraid of the shadows. The city becomes abstract, reflecting only itself. People almost seem out of place in this landscape. Before the war, there were nooks and crannies everywhere. Now people are trying to eliminate shadows, straighten streets. You can’t even put up a shed without the personal authorization of the minister of culture. When I was growing up, my grandpa built a small house. Next door the youth club had some sheds, down the street the local painter stored his equipment under some stretched-out tarpaulin. Everybody added on. It was telescopic. A game. Life wasn’t so expensive — ordinary people would live and work in Paris. You’d see masons in blue overalls, painters in white ones, carpenters in corduroys. Nowadays, just look at Faubourg Sainte-Antoine — traditional craftsmen are being pushed out by advertising agencies and design galleries. Land is so expensive that only huge companies can build, and they have to build ‘huge’ in order to make it profitable. Cubes, squares, rectangles. Everything straight, everything even. Clutter has been outlawed. But a little disorder is a good thing. That’s where poetry lurks. We never needed promoters to provide us, in their generosity, with ‘leisure spaces.’ We invented our own. Today there’s no question of putting your own space together, the planning commission will shut it down. Spontaneity has been outlawed. People are afraid of life.

To improve your bounce rate, you need to either adjust the service—iteratively, using A/B testing—or adjust who you are trying to attract to your service. If people are coming to your site and only a small percentage “stay,” the answer is never, I repeat, never to try to get higher volumes of traffic.

That was the story coming out of city hall, the small-print narrative on the full-page advertisements that appeared in glossy local magazines. Except none of these projections would ever come true. New Orleans would not hold steady, not in the least. The city’s population reached its apex in 1960. But no one knew that then.

The chopped salad is engineered…to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?

Consider the tourist brochures used by countries to advertise their wares: you can expect that the pictures presented to you will look much, much better than anything you will encounter in the place. And the bias, the difference (for which humans correct, thanks to common sense), can be measured as the country shown in the tourist brochure minus the country seen with your naked eyes. That difference can be small, or large. We also make such corrections with commercial products, not overly trusting advertising. But we don’t correct for the difference in science, medicine, and mathematics, for the same reasons we didn’t pay attention to iatrogenics. We are suckers for the sophisticated.

I believe the reasons we hang on to seemingly insignificant snippets of conversation, the smell of a particular pizza delivered by a particular guy, the shape of certain shadows on a particular wall, is that there may come a day when we are sitting in a hospital room visiting our mother as she lies on an uncomfortable bed, still recovering. And we are asking her questions and feeling nervous about what the doctor has said could be permanent damage caused by a blood clot the size of a pinpoint and we don't know if the way she is struggling to find the right words is a temporary exhaustion or the new reality and all we want to do is tell her we love her in a language no one has used before because we mean it in a way that no one has meant it before. And this will be a difficult time for us. But then, in a break between the words, a commercial may come on the small television hung up in the corner of the room that we did not even know was playing. It may advertise some new drug, some insurance plan, and our mother will smile at the voice of the handsome actor standing in front of a green screen. She will then close her eyes and squeeze our hand, the one that she has been holding since we walked in, and say, "Oh, I used to have such a crush on him." When she does this, our memory will be waiting. Yes, yes, yes. It is love that we feel here. This is the purpose of memory.

In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement.

As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith’s basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels. For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith’s scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising.

I have not yet described to you the most singular part. About six years ago—to be exact, upon the 4th of May, 1882—an advertisement appeared in the Times asking for the address of Miss Mary Morstan and stating that it would be to her advantage to come forward. There was no name or address appended. I had at that time just entered the family of Mrs. Cecil Forrester in the capacity of governess. By her advice I published my address in the advertisement column. The same day there arrived through the post a small card-board box addressed to me, which I found to contain a very large and lustrous pearl. No word of writing was enclosed. Since then every year upon the same date there has always appeared a similar box, containing a similar pearl, without any clue as to the sender.

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals. Many people—people who make posters for leading publishers, write captions for the BBC, compose letters and advertisements for important institutions—seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle through any collection of words as if from a salt shaker. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: “Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results.” All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is “the daily Telegraph”? Is it really possible to be that unobservant? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an e-mail from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in Great Britain. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: “Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families…” In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and gotten the name of her own department wrong—this from a person whose job is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a pediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word “children’s” twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children’s specialist working in a children’s hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

He had done it all, from barnstorming to crop dusting, and had even flown a Davis Waco with the Baby Ruth Flying Circus. It was an advertising blitz unlike anything the country had ever seen. Billy would fly over county and state fairs, racetracks, and crowded beaches in his red and white plane, dropping hundreds of tiny rice paper parachutes—each one bearing a small Baby Ruth candy bar—on the crowds below.

A documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s early twentieth-century exposition to the South Pole shows the classified ad Shackleton put in a London newspaper:   “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” Ernest Shackleton.2 Men responded to Shackleton’s advertisement in droves. Why? Because the mission was clear. The cost and potential loss both drew the right men and made sure the wrong men didn’t sign up. God’s mission, similarly, is not for the faint of heart. Even becoming a Christian, according to Jesus, should be weighed heavily. Luke says, “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish”’ (Luke 14:28-30).

The last year had been a series of wrong turns, bad choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had been unable to decide on a name, let alone a musical direction. There was the alternative club night that no-one had gone to, the abandoned first novel, the abandoned second novel, several miserable summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. At her very, very lowest ebb she had taken a course in Circus Skills until it transpired that she had none. Trapeze was not the solution. The much-advertised Second Summer of Love had been one of melancholy and lost momentum. Even her beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in a her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankellior Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small.

Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisment for the pursuit of happiness.

The problem with governments is that they will tend to support these fragile organisms “because they are large employers” and because they have lobbyists, the kind of phony but visible advertised contributions so decried by Bastiat. Large companies get government support and become progressively larger and more fragile, and, in a way, run government, another prophetic view of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Hairdressers and small businesses on the other hand, fail without anyone caring about them; they need to be efficient and to obey the laws of nature.

At the moment, the cycle of insincere public apologies is probably making everyone suspicious of forgiveness. But what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do? Spontaneously advertise their own sins in order to pre-empt public exposure? Just try never to accomplish anything that might bring them increased scrutiny of any kind? Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe the number of people who have done seriously bad things is not insignificant...what if it's not only a small number of evil people who are out there...What if it's all of us?

We want to allow millions of small businesses to accept credit cards for the first time, so we have to make it easy to sign up. We need easy sign-up, so we have to design simple software and eliminate paper contracts. We have millions of people signing up, so we have to keep our customer service costs down. We need to keep customer service costs down, so we have to have simple pricing, and net settlements, and no hidden fees, and no paper contracts. We need to have a low price, so we have to save money on advertising, so we have to have an amazing product, and hardware so cool that people talk about it, and a product that they can explain without our help.

When young I'd visit my aunt in small town Tennessee. Her place was carved into the side of a steep ridge. All red mud and gravel. The driveway was too steep for most. You just parked at the bottom and struggled up to the front door. You really had to want to visit. The closest anything was a truck stop off I-75. Near where fog caused a 99 car crash. We went there to eat biscuits and gravy. Wash it down with whole milk. Prostitutes advertised by CB. They found a dead trucker in a restroom once. No one seemed surprised. There was a rigged Coin Pusher machine. Elvira Pinball. I set the high score. Then returned to Florida. Where teachers asked me to write about my summer.

I suppose that many think we live in a cheap and sensational age, all sky-signs and headlines; an age of advertisement and standardization. And yet, this is a more enlightened age than any human beings have lived in hitherto. For instance, practically all of us can read. Some of you may say: ‘Ah! But what? Detective stories, scandals, and the sporting news.’ No doubt, compared with Sunday newspapers and mystery stories, the Oedipus, Hamlet and Faust are very small beer. All the same, the number of volumes issued each year continually gains on the number of the population in all Western countries. Every phase and question of life is brought more and more into the limelight. Theatres, cinemas, the radio, and even lectures, assist the process. But they do not, and should not replace reading, because when we are just watching and listening, somebody is taking very good care that we should not stop and think. The danger in this age is not of our remaining ignorant; it is that we should lose the power of thinking for ourselves. Problems are more and more put before us, but, except to crossword puzzles and detective mysteries, do we attempt to find the answers for ourselves? Less and less. The short cut seems ever more and more desirable. But the short cut to knowledge is nearly always the longest way round. There is nothing like knowledge, picked up by or reasoned out for oneself.

All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness. We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.

At least you've brought gifts. What's in the basket?" She rummaged through the contents. "A few sweetmeats and lozenges. Packets of raisins. But mostly it's Aunt Thea's surplus cosmetics and remedies. She sends away for every product advertised in every ladies' magazine. I like to see them put to some use." He blinked at her. "These are your gifts?" "Your men have depleted our stores of food, and I didn't have time to prepare anything else." "What are they supposed to do with-" he held up a brown bottle and peered at the label- "Dr. Jacobs' Miracle Elixir?" He plucked a small jar out next. "Excelsior Blemish Cream?" "Women are women, Logan. Every girl needs a bit of luxury and a chance to feel pretty now and then.

I have spent just about every day of the past four years analyzing Google data. This included a stint as a data scientist at Google, which hired me after learning about my racism research. And I continue to explore this data as an opinion writer and data journalist for the New York Times. The revelations have kept coming. Mental illness; human sexuality; child abuse; abortion; advertising; religion; health. Not exactly small topics, and this dataset, which didn’t exist a couple of decades ago, offered surprising new perspectives on all of them. Economists and other social scientists are always hunting for new sources of data, so let me be blunt: I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.

In every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual "taste"... [is] produce[d by the devil and his angels]. This they do bu working through the small circle of artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus [they] have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females-and there is more in that than you might suppose. As regards the male taste [they] have varied a good deal. At one time [they] have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men's vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, [they] have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present [they] are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and [they] now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, [they] thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many [successful] results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. [They] have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, or course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them to appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result [they] are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.

There are a number of advantages to moving yourself, with saving money being number one. I have done professional loading and unloading for countless shippers. Most were looking at savings of approximately fifty percent when all expenses were considered. These were people who were moving mostly 8,000 pound or less of furniture (household goods)-- the weight of the contents of the average small three-bedroom home and the maximum usable (as opposed to advertised) capacity of the largest rental trucks. Moving yourself has other advantages too. Weather and road conditions permitting, the move will go on your schedule. You won’t have to worry about coordinating with your movers for delivery because you are the movers. There is also the security of knowing exactly where your stuff is with no worries about delays, mixed-up shipments or theft.

Edith, in her veal-coloured room in the Hotel du Lac, sat with her hands in her lap, wondering what she was doing there. And then remembered, and trembled. And thought with shame of her small injustices, of her unworthy thoughts towards those excellent women who had befriended her, and to whom she had revealed nothing. I have been too harsh on women, she thought, because I understand them better than I understand men. I know their watchfulness, their patience, their need to advertise themselves as successful. Their need never to admit to a failure. I know all that because I am one of them. I am harsh because I remember Mother and her unkindness, and because I am continually on the alert for more. But women are not all like Mother, and it is really stupid of me to imagine that they are. Edith, Father would have said, think a little. You have made a false equation.

While advertising was once used primarily to create a sale or enhance an image, it must now be used to create awareness about Web content. • While SEO was at one time primarily a function of optimizing a Web site, it must now be a function of optimizing brand assets across social media. • While lead generation used to consist of broadcasting messages, it must now rely heavily on being found in the right place at the right time. • While lead conversion in the past often consisted of multiple sales calls to supply information, it must now supplement Web information gathering with value delivery. • While referrals used to be a simple matter of passing a name, they now rely heavily on an organization’s online reputation, ratings, and reviews. • While physical store location has always mattered, online location for the local business has become a life-and-death matter.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and from, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

It floats!” These two words threatened to sink Woodrow Wilson. Soap had been part of civilization for at least four thousand years, going as far back as the Babylonians, who had discovered a formula for water, alkali, and oils that could dissolve dirt and grease. In the 1830s, a man named Alexander Norris suggested that his two sons-in-law—one of whom made candles, the other soap—merge their companies. William Procter and James Gamble did just that, making a small fortune together as purveyors to the Union army during the Civil War. A decade later, Gamble’s son created a phenomenon, combining a strong laundry detergent and a gentle cleaner and whipping in enough air to keep the white cake of soap from sinking. Its two-word advertising campaign helped turn Ivory soap into an American household staple for another century and Procter & Gamble into one of America’s leading manufacturers.

You can build a fortune through the aid of laws which are immutable. But, first, you must become familiar with these laws, and learn to USE them. Through repetition, and by approaching the description of these principles from every conceivable angle, the author hopes to reveal to you the secret through which every great fortune has been accumulated. Strange and paradoxical as it may seem, the "secret" is NOT A SECRET. Nature, herself, advertises it in the earth on which we live, the stars, the planets suspended within our view, in the elements above and around us, in every blade of grass, and every form of life within our vision. Nature advertises this "secret" in the terms of biology, in the conversion of a tiny cell, so small that it may be lost on the point of a pin, into the HUMAN BEING now reading this line. The conversion of desire into its physical equivalent is, certainly, no more miraculous!

To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life. Only angels know unrelieved joy-or are able to stand it. Yet we see the books by the mind-healers with their garish titles: "Joy!" "Awakening," and the like; we see them in person in lecture halls or in groups, beaming their particular brand of inward, confident well-being, so that it communicates its unmistakable message: we can do this for you, too, if you will only let us. I have never seen or heard them communicate the dangers of the total liberation that they claim to offer; say, to put up a small sign next to the one advertising joy, carrying some inscription like "Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back." It would be honest and would also relieve them of some of the guilt of the occasional suicide that takes place in therapy.

I sign in on the form and hand the clipboard back to the volunteer manning the desk. The young man’s brows rise in recognition of my name. “Mr. Pierce!” He stands from his seat and sticks out his hand to shake mine. “I didn’t expect it would be you representing Pierce Industries. I thought you’d send someone.” I shake his hand, out of politeness, then force a stiff smile. “Surprise.” God, I hate small talk. Especially from this twenty-two year old ass-kisser who likely hopes this interaction will earn him employment at my company. I’m afraid it’s not that easy to even get an interview. He lowers his focus to the nametags on the table, searching for the one with the Pierce Industries logo. He hands it to me, and I pocket it. I refuse to wear it. I’m easily enough recognized without advertising it. The man—nothing more than a boy, really—seems disappointed. Whether it’s because I’m not as charismatic or charming as he’d imagined or because I dismissed the damn nametag, I can’t be certain. Frankly, I don’t give a shit. Once upon a time, his emotions would have elicited more interest from me. Now, they’re barely a blip on my radar. I’ll never understand them. No point in wasting my time trying. His smile

President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), accountable for the overall achievement of the Strategic Objective and reporting to the SHAREHOLDERS who include, on an equal basis, Jack and Murray. • Vice-President/Marketing, accountable for finding customers and finding new ways to provide customers with the satisfactions they derive from widgets, at lower cost, and with greater ease, and reporting to the COO. • Vice-President/Operations, accountable for keeping customers by delivering to them what is promised by Marketing, and for discovering new ways of assembling widgets, at lower cost, and with greater efficiency so as to provide the customer with better service, reporting to the COO. • Vice-President/Finance, accountable for supporting both Marketing and Operations in the fulfillment of their accountabilities by achieving the company’s profitability standards, and by securing capital whenever it’s needed, and at the best rates, also reporting to the COO. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Marketing are two positions: Sales Manager and Advertising/Research Manager. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Operations are three positions: Production Manager, Service Manager, and Facilities Manager. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Finance are two positions: Accounts Receivable Manager and Accounts Payable Manager.

The billboards ruin everything. The historical flavor, the old-time architecture, even the beauty of the wooded hillside—all are sacrificed. Pole-lines and wires may be accepted, like fences, as part of the basic American landscape. They do their work without striving to be conspicuous, and often their not-ungraceful curves add a touch of interest, an intricacy of pattern, even some beauty. Billboards are different. . . . billboards blast themselves into the viewer's consciousness. . . . some of the smaller billboards—those advertising local hotels, service-stations, or small industries—seem to have a certain rooting in the soil, and are often modest and comparatively harmonious to the setting. The large billboards—owned by special companies, usually advertising the products of mass-production—are always placed in the most conspicuous spots, and have designs and colors carefully chosen to clash with the background. One feels a difference between a home-produced: "Stop at Joe's Service Station for Gas—Two Miles," or "The Liberty Café—Short Orders at All Hours—Give Us a Try!" and some gigantic rectangle advertising tires or beer. Large billboards are now springing up along U. S. 40 even in the vastnesses of the Nevada sagebrush country. They are an abomination! Personally, I try to buy as little as possible of anything that is so advertised.

A reply dated 13 May finally arrived from the town clerk. Mr Mottershead could open the zoo subject to: 1) the type of animals being limited to those already described in previous correspondence; 2) the estate should not be used as an amusement park, racing track or public dance hall; and 3) no animals were to be kept within a distance of a hundred feet from the existing road. This necessitated the purchase of an additional strip of land between the road and the estate, which would have to be securely enclosed, but which couldn't be used for animals. (First it was used as a children's playground and later became a self-service cafe.) Somehow my dad managed to get a further mortgage of £350 to pay for the land and fencing. Of all the conditions, the most damaging in the long term was the last: the zoo was allowed 'no advertisement, sign or noticeboard which can be seen from the road above-mentioned'. Only a small sign at the entrance to the estate would be permitted, which meant the lodge, which was a good twenty-five yards from the road was completely invisible to any passing car. This would remain a problem for a very long time. For many years, the night before bank holidays, Dad and his friends would have to go out and hang temporary posters under the official road signs on the Chester bypass. The police turned a blind eye as long as they were taken down shortly afterwards.

Social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest took a step closer to offering ecommerce on their own platforms this week, as the battle to win over retailers hots up. Facebook announced on Thursday it is trialling a “buy” button to allow people to purchase a product without ever leaving the social network’s app. The initial test, with a handful of small and medium-sized businesses in the US, could lead to more ecommerce companies buying adverts on the network. It could also allow Facebook to compile payment information and encourage people to make more transactions via the platform as it would save them typing in card numbers on smartphones. But the social network said no credit or debit card details will be shared with other advertisers. Twitter acquired CardSpring, a payments infrastructure company, this week for an undisclosed price as part of plans to feature more ecommerce around live events or, as it puts it, “in-the-moment commerce experiences”. CardSpring connects payment details with loyalty cards and coupons for transactions online and in stores. The home of the 140-character message hired Nathan Hubbard, former chief executive of Ticketmaster, last year to work on creating an ecommerce product. It has since worked with Amazon, to allow people to add things to their online basket by tweeting, and with Starbucks to encourage people to tweet to buy a coffee for a friend.

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I sat down next to Connie at the front desk. I almost never sat down next to Connie when she wasn’t just starting to rub lotion into her hands. I watched her rub her hands together. Her hands were like lubed animals doing a mating dance. And she was hardly alone: people everywhere kept bottles of lotion in and around their desks, people everywhere that morning were just starting to rub lotion into their hands. I missed the point. I hated missing the point, but I did, I missed it completely. If I could just become a lotioner, I thought, how many other small, pleasurable gestures made throughout the day might click into place for me, and all that exile, all that alienation and scorn, simply vanish? But I couldn’t do it. I despised the wet sensation that refused to subside even after all the lotion had been rubbed in and could be rubbed in no farther. I hit that terminal point and wanted nothing more to do with something either salutary or vain but never pleasant. I thought it was heinous. That little hardened dollop of lotion right at the lip of the squirter, that was really so heinous. But it was part of the point, the whole point. Why was I always on the outside looking in, always alien to the in? As I say, Connie was not alone. In medical offices, law firms, and advertising agencies, in industrial parks, shipping facilities, and state capitols, in ranger stations and even in military barracks, people were moisturizing. They

When should you be skeptical? Any time you see a report that a single food, beverage, supplement, food product, or ingredient causes or reduces the risk for obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or cancer, it is a good idea to envision a red warning flag flying high in the air. The studies may have identified associations between the food factor and the disease, but associations can be due to any number of other causes. Dietary patterns, not single factors, are what matter to health. Look out for words like “miracle” or “breakthrough.” Science tends to proceed in small increments and rarely works that way. And please be especially skeptical of “everything you thought you knew about nutrition is wrong.” Science does not work that way, either. Whenever you see “may” or “might”—as in “may reduce the risk of heart disease” or “might improve cognition in the elderly”—recognize that these also mean “may not” or “might not.” Overall, it is always a good idea to ask whether study results seem plausible in the light of everything else you know. As an eater, you should be wary of media hype about whether fat or sugar is a more important cause of health problems. This question ignores basic principles of nutrition: we eat foods, not nutrients, and how much we eat is often just as important as what we eat. Diets of enormous variety, from Asian diets traditionally based on rice (carbohydrates that convert to sugar in the body) to Mediterranean diets rich in olive oil (fat), can all promote long and healthy lives. The basic principles of eating healthfully have remained remarkably constant over the years: eat a wide variety of relatively unprocessed foods in reasonable amounts. Note that these same dietary principles apply to prevention of the entire range of diet-related chronic diseases. If an industry-funded study claims miraculous benefits from the sponsor’s products, think, “Advertising.

Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).

How I Turned a Troubled Company into a Personal Fortune. How to ________ This is a simple, straightforward headline structure that works with any desirable benefit. “How to” are two of the most powerful words you can use in a headline. Examples: How to Collect from Social Security at Any Age. How to Win Friends and Influence People. How to Improve Telemarketers' Productivity — for Just $19.95. Secrets Of ________ The word secrets works well in headlines. Examples: Secrets of a Madison Ave. Maverick — “Contrarian Advertising.” Secrets of Four Champion Golfers. Thousands (Hundreds, Millions) Now ________ Even Though They ________ This is a “plural” version of the very first structure demonstrated in this collection of winning headlines. Examples: Thousands Now Play Even Though They Have “Clumsy Fingers.” Two Million People Owe Their Health to This Idea Even Though They Laughed at It. 138,000 Members of Your Profession Receive a Check from Us Every Month Even Though They Once Threw This Letter into the Wastebasket Warning: ________ Warning is a powerful, attention-getting word and can usually work for a headline tied to any sales letter using a problem-solution copy theme. Examples: Warning: Two-Thirds of the Middle Managers in Your Industry Will Lose Their Jobs in the Next 36 Months. Warning: Your “Corporate Shield” May Be Made of Tissue Paper — 9 Ways You Can Be Held Personally Liable for Your Business's Debts, Losses, or Lawsuits Give Me ________ and I'll ________ This structure simplifies the gist of any sales message: a promise. It truly telegraphs your offer, and if your offer is clear and good, this may be your best strategy. Examples: Give Me 5 Days and I'll Give You a Magnetic Personality. Give Me Just 1 Hour a Day and I'll Have You Speaking French Like “Pierre” in 1 Month. Give Me a Chance to Ask Seven Questions and I'll Prove You Are Wasting a Small Fortune on Your Advertising. ________ ways to ________ This is just the “how to” headline enhanced with an intriguing specific number. Examples: 101 Ways to Increase New Patient Flow. 17 Ways to Slash Your Equipment Maintenance Costs. Many of these example headlines are classics from very successful books, advertisements, sales letters, and brochures, obtained from a number of research sources. Some are from my own sales letters. Some were created for this book.

Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.

I trade in the finest quality opium,' the old merchant said. 'My products are all fresh, pure, unadulterated, stamped, and correctly weighed. We owe this refinement of our commodity to a serious and high-minded Englishman who came to Isfahan many many years ago, and showed us that purity and reliability in our product would guarantee a regular demand for it. We have never adulterated our opium since that day. To-day it is the finest in the world, fit for men, women and children, ideal for regular consumption, and without the excessive reactions which one usually suffers from the heavily oiled opium of the east. For bringing honesty to the opium trade, we owe so much to that remarkable Englishman that I would like to take the liberty of presenting you each with a small silver box of our product--the very finest little black pearls of constant enjoyment.' 'I hasten to state my unworthiness,' MacGregor said. 'On the contrary,' the merchant replied. 'My gift is unworthy of your illustrious heritage.' MacGregor rejected the three small silver boxes, and told the curious Katherine and Essex of the illustrious Englishman who had brought all this upon them, having put the opium manufacture of Isfahan on such a sound moral basis.

Don't delude yourself: You cannot succeed without media advertising.

But suppose we say that Google is primarily an advertising company. That changes things. The U.S. search-engine advertising market is $17 billion annually. Online advertising is $37 billion annually. The entire U.S. advertising market is $150 billion. And global advertising is a $495 billion market. So even if Google completely monopolized U.S. search-engine advertising, it would own just 3.4% of the global advertising market. From this angle, Google looks like a small player in a competitive world.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. Mark twain

Ask yourself the following questions to find profitable niches. 1. Which social, industry, and professional groups do you belong to, have you belonged to, or do you understand, whether dentists, engineers, rock climbers, recreational cyclists, car restoration aficionados, dancers, or other? Look creatively at your resume, work experience, physical habits, and hobbies and compile a list of all the groups, past and present, that you can associate yourself with. Look at products and books you own, include online and offline subscriptions, and ask yourself, “What groups of people purchase the same?” Which magazines, websites, and newsletters do you read on a regular basis? 2. Which of the groups you identified have their own magazines? Visit a large bookstore such as Barnes & Noble and browse the magazine rack for smaller specialty magazines to brainstorm additional niches. There are literally thousands of occupation- and interest/hobby-specific magazines to choose from. Use Writer’s Market to identify magazine options outside the bookstores. Narrow the groups from question 1 above to those that are reachable through one or two small magazines. It’s not important that these groups all have a lot of money (e.g., golfers)—only that they spend money (amateur athletes, bass fishermen, etc.) on products of some type. Call these magazines, speak to the advertising directors, and tell them that you are considering advertising; ask them to e-mail their current advertising rate card and include both readership numbers and magazine back-issue samples. Search the back issues for repeat advertisers who sell direct-to-consumer via 800 numbers or websites—the more repeat advertisers, and the more frequent their ads, the more profitable a magazine is for them … and will be for us.

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton, the venerated British explorer, embarked on an expedition to traverse Antarctica. His recruitment advertisement in The Times (London) read: Men wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

Mass advertising efforts tend to work with a small minority of adults, leaving the majority with deepening skepticism toward Christians and faith communities. The message of Jesus and the invitation to participate in a local community are turned into a mere marketing campaign. Are there times when marketing should be employed, particularly in relational ways, such as giving people in your church invitation cards for their churchless neighbors? Yes! But every method should be adopted with the knowledge that what’s at stake is much more than what kind of numbers we attract each Sunday. We are stewards of the truest story about humanity and God. We must take care not to cheapen the gospel by relying on marketing prowess to attract attenders.

ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while

Time and again, I was told, “Don’t do it.” But sometimes the best advice is that which you don’t take. Instead of listening to people who told me to quit, I heeded the quote that sits on a small placard on my desk: “What can be conceived can be created.” I discovered only recently that it was from a 1980s-era car advertisement. That’s OK, though, because it reminds me that dreams should be lofty. T oby Cosgrove, MD, CEO of Cleveland Clinic

advertising or PR, which gives a short burst of traffic, search engine optimization can increase traffic to your site for months or years.

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

The marketing priorities of a large company looks something like this: Pleasing The Board Of Directors Appeasing Shareholders Satisfying Superiors’ Biases Satisfying Existing Clients’ Preconceptions Winning Advertising And Creative Awards Getting “Buy In” From Various Committees And Stakeholders Making A Profit The marketing priorities of a small business owner look something like this: Making A Profit

very few marketers or advertisers will be interested in small audiences, even if the product or site is destined for huge audiences down the road. The

Billboards can do more than attract direct sales on occasion. Billboards also help when you are new to an area and want to make your presence known and when you want to tie in with a unique advertising campaign or promotion.

Direct marketing refers to direct-mail, e-mail, Web site, mail-order, or coupon advertising, as well as to telephone marketing, direct-response TV, postcard decks, door-to-door salespeople, home shopping TV shows, or any method of marketing that attempts to make a sale right then and there.

morning he couldn’t dwell on waffles and fudge, famous or not. He was far too occupied with thoughts of April and the slimy figure of Jack Leeper. The Boones were seated at a small table in the crowded diner. The air was thick with bacon grease and strong coffee, and the hot topic, as Theo realized not long after he sat down, was the abduction of April Finnemore. To their right, four uniformed policemen talked loudly about the possibility that Leeper was close by. To their left, a table of gray-haired men spoke with great authority on several subjects, but seemed particularly interested in the “kidnapping,” as it was sometimes referred to. The menu promoted the myth that Gertrude’s was indeed the home of “World-Famous Pecan Waffles.” In silent protest against false advertising, Theo ordered scrambled eggs and sausage.

1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks).

In today’s media environment, invisibility is a fate much worse than failure for any business large or small.

Why are you doing this? Ever find yourself working on something without knowing exactly why? Someone just told you to do it. It’s pretty common, actually. That’s why it’s important to ask why you’re working on____. What is this for? Who benefits? What’s the motivation behind it? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you better understand the work itself. What problem are you solving? What’s the problem? Are customers confused? Are you confused? Is something not clear enough? Was something not possible before that should be possible now? Sometimes when you ask these questions, you’ll find you’re solving an imaginary problem. That’s when it’s time to stop and reevaluate what the hell you’re doing. Is this actually useful? Are you making something useful or just making something? It’s easy to confuse enthusiasm with usefulness. Sometimes it’s fine to play a bit and build something cool. But eventually you’ve got to stop and ask yourself if it’s useful, too. Cool wears off. Useful never does. Are you adding value? Adding something is easy; adding value is hard. Is this thing you’re working on actually making your product more valuable for customers? Can they get more out of it than they did before? Sometimes things you think are adding value actually subtract from it. Too much ketchup can ruin the fries. Value is about balance. Will this change behavior? Is what you’re working on really going to change anything? Don’t add something unless it has a real impact on how people use your product. Is there an easier way? Whenever you’re working on something, ask, “Is there an easier way?” You’ll often find this easy way is more than good enough for now. Problems are usually pretty simple. We just imagine that they require hard solutions. What could you be doing instead? What can’t you do because you’re doing this? This is especially important for small teams with constrained resources. That’s when prioritization is even more important. If you work on A, can you still do B and C before April? If not, would you rather have B and C instead of A? If you’re stuck on something for a long period of time, that means there are other things you’re not getting done. Is it really worth it? Is what you’re doing really worth it? Is this meeting worth pulling six people off their work for an hour? Is it worth pulling an all-nighter tonight, or could you just finish it up tomorrow? Is it worth getting all stressed out over a press release from a competitor? Is it worth spending your money on advertising? Determine the real value of what you’re about to do before taking the plunge.

Empirical evidence suggests that the relationship between the profitability of larger share and smaller share depends on the industry. Exhibit 7-1 compares the rate of return on equity of the largest firms accounting for at least 30 percent of industry sales (leaders) to the rate of return on equity of the medium-sized firms in the same industry (followers). In this calculation small firms with assets less than $500,000 were excluded. Although some of the industries in the sample are overly broad, it is striking that followers were noticeably more profitable than leaders in 15 of 38 industries. The industries in which the followers’ rates of return were higher appear generally to be those where economies of scale are either not great or absent (clothing, footwear, pottery, meat products, carpets) and/or those that are highly segmented (optical, medical and ophthalmic goods, liquor, periodicals, carpets, and toys and sporting goods). The industries in which leaders’ rates of return are higher seem to be generally those with heavy advertising (soap; perfumes; soft drinks; grain mill products, i.e., cereal; cutlery) and/or research outlays and production economies of scale (radio and television, drugs, photographic equipment). This outcome is as we would expect.

From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both. In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is a waste of goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the two are conventionally accepted as equivalents. The choice between them is a question of advertising expediency simply, except so far as it may be affected by other standards of propriety, springing from a different source. On grounds of expediency the preference may be given to the one or the other at different stages of the economic development. The question is, which of the two methods will most effectively reach the persons whose convictions it is desired to affect. Usage has answered this question in different ways under different circumstances. So long as the community or social group is small enough and compact enough to be effectually reached by common notoriety alone,—that is to say, so long as the human environment to which the individual is required to adapt himself in respect of reputability is comprised within his sphere of personal acquaintance and neighborhood gossip,—so long the one method is about as effective as the other. Each will therefore serve about equally well during the earlier stages of social growth. But when the differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to reach a wider human environment, consumption begins to hold over leisure as an ordinary means of decency. This is especially true during the later, peaceable economic stage. The means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging of his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct observation.

My nature is to try to figure things out on my own, which, in retrospect, has been bad for me. I stumbled on the most basic business problems: Where do I buy materials? How do I keep records? How do I pay taxes for my employees? How do I advertise? It was very hard to find answers. There were books about running a business, but none about my business. I never imagined that anyone would be interested in helping me, so I never asked for help. And I was always so strapped for time that I would implement the first idea I found, even if it was bad practice. I just muddled along for years and years.

The woman who invented the Landlord’s Game, Elizabeth Magie, was an advocate of that tax. As an unmarried woman with her own home, rare at the time, she struggled to support herself on the $10 per week she earned as a stenographer. “If we could be reduced to the character of a machine,” she remarked, “having only to be oiled and kept in working order, $10 perhaps would be sufficient.” Rather than marry out of economic necessity, she advertised herself for sale to the highest bidder as a “young woman American slave.” This made national news and caused a small scandal. Her brother, embarrassed, said she was just trying to publicize her writing. As well as being an inventor, she was also a poet.

Lynn expressed particular concern about Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and began our conversation teeing off on the first two. These companies, he said, have used their dominant market positions to skim large amounts of advertising dollars from news organizations, harming local communities. Advertising revenue declines have hit small and midsize papers especially hard, hollowing out local accountability reporting across the United States, a boon to local officials who would rather not be watched.