Laundry Advertising Quotes

She glanced over her shoulder to look at the forty-foot cabin cruiser where Captain Tarwater posed on the bow looking like an advertisement for a particularly rigid laundry detergent - Bumstick Go-Be-Bright, perhaps

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.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

A vending machine hung tilted from the wall, advertising laundry soap at fifty yen a packet to customers who might as well have been ghosts.

In the spring of 2002, popular clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch decided to, as they say, fuck around and find out. The company’s latest round of overpriced clothing included an assortment of Asian-themed novelty graphic T-shirts advertising fictional businesses. One of the designs, the one most people seem to remember, was for “Wong Brothers Laundry Service,” evoking stereotypically cheap Chinatown labor, bachelor societies, and Ancient Chinese Secrets.

hatch our survival plan in the coolest place we could find. We made our way into the cluttered room at the windowed front of the deckhouse—what our boat builders back in Hong Kong called the “lavish grand salon” in their sales brochures. With us, it was more like the messy rumpus room. True, the room had, as advertised, “a curved couch, sleek teak paneling, and hardwood cabinetry with a built-in sink.” But the sink had dirty dishes and empty soda bottles in it, the paneled walls were cluttered with a collection of my parents’ favorite treasures (including a conquistador helmet, a rare African tribal mask, a grog jug shaped like a frog, a rusty cannonball from a Confederate gunboat, a bronze clock covered with cherubs that probably belonged to King Louis XIV, and, in a glass shadow box, a rusty steak knife from the Titanic). There were assorted trinkets, necklaces, and coconut heads suspended from the ceiling. Add a heap of scuba and snorkel gear and assorted socks, shoes, and T-shirts on the floor (the floor is our laundry basket), and our grand salon looked more like a live-in recycling bin. “Have we even seen a map for this treasure hunt?” asked Beck. “Nope. Dad just said we needed to be in the Caymans.” “Then we need to find his map.

In the 1920s, this place housed a commercial laundry that was listed in the phone book under an ad for the Anti-Jap Laundry League, at a time when businesses proudly advertised “white labor” as if it were a fair-trade label.

Marketing is the art of washing one’s clean laundry in public.

We live in a drug culture! Drugs are everywhere and touted as the panacea for every ailment in our society. We have drugs for hyper children, drugs for depression—some of the most insidious drugs ever—, drugs for allergies, drugs for acne, drugs for emphysema and drugs for erectile disfunction—maybe the most useful of them all. And let’s not forget the side effects of these wonder drugs! It’s cliche to even talk about drug advertisements and the laundry list of side effects tacked onto the end of them, usually rattled off at warp speed by someone on loan from the local auction house. I’ve seen ads for acne medicines that include side effects that are potentially fatal! Seriously? “Hey! Buy our Acne-Magic Drug! You’ll have crystal clear skin! In your coffin!” What the hell is wrong with us?