Soap Advertisement Quotes

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

Will looked at Evie funny. "Advertising?" "Yes. You've heard of it, haven't you? Swell modern invention. It lets people know about something they need. Soap, lipstick, radios—or your museum, for instance. We could start with a catchy slogan, like, 'The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult—we've got the spirit!

Someone had already remarked that Bruckner had been Hitler’s favorite composer, someone else, that there was something wrong with any young person who really enjoyed the late Beethoven; someone had already confided that the soap business in America amounted to seven million dollars a year, someone else that advertising amounted to seven billion.

You and I are like two people . . .' He paused and began again more quickly: 'Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read "Monkey's Soap"; if you look back when you've passed it's "Needs no Rinsing." . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet third. . . . But I hope we respect each other.

A product would drop out of sight overnight without advertising, I don’t care what it is, a book or a brand of soap, it would drop out of sight. We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.

You and I are like two people . . ." He paused and began again more quickly: "Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read 'Monkey's Soap'; if you look back when you've passed it's 'Needs no Rinsing.' . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet third. . . . But I hope we respect each other.

Pretty; beautiful even; touchingly untouched. An advertisement for soap, all natural ingredients. The face looks deaf: it has that vacant, posed imperviousness of all well-brought-up girls of the time. A tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on.

t is quite important to find the best thing to do. It is much more important to find something to do. If I were a young artist, I would paint soap advertisements, if that were all opportunity offered, until I got ahead enough to indulge in the painting of madonnas and landscapes. If I were a young musician, I would rather play in a street band than not at all. If I were a young writer, I would do hack work, if necessary, until I became able to write the Great American Novel. I would go to work. Nothing in all this world I have found is so good as work.

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk... I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up. Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief. It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers. To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret! And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!... Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long? The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!

The method which I advocate is what, I believe, the advertisers call Direct Suggestion, sir, consisting as it does of driving an idea home by constant repetition. You may have had experience of the system?” “You mean they keep on telling you that some soap or other is the best, and after a bit you come under the influence and charge round the corner and buy a cake?

I complain about the United States not being Athens. I certainly say we are a very good Roman republic, and the lies are based upon the most advanced techniques of advertising, which is the only art form my country has ever created—the television commercial—and we sell soap and presidents in the same fashion. Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.

Tourists see invisible things. Sometimes their point of view eluded him. By now, he was often the first in the group to raise his camera: to a roadside shrine or a sunset, to a buffalo plowing a paddy, ribs curved like a boat. But why were the others laughing at a billboard advertising Perlwite soap? What was fascinating about two village women grinding chilies on a stone? The dust of familiarity still lay in patches on the scenes through which he moved.

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.

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.

The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life. The physical comforts were certainly meagre, but at the Ritz Paul had learned to appreciate the inadequacy of purely physical comfort. It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meals, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free. At some rather chilly time in the early morning a bell would ring, and the warder would say, "Slops outside!"; he would rise, roll up his bedding, and dress; there was no need to shave, no hesitation about what tie he should wear, none of the fidgeting with studs and collars and links that so distracts the waking moments of civilized man. He felt like the happy people in the advertisements for shaving soap who seem to have achieved very simply that peace of mind so distant and so desirable in the early morning.

As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. ''He needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.'' Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny - the going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood-more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him-was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product.

But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate–For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too–As I'll show–It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism–Says Dave "People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles–Isnt that amazing?give me a little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, "The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?"–The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one–In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip–Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, "Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?"–"Let's go tell him right now!"–"Why of course if we wait another minute...and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!"–We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner. (Big Sur, Chap. 11)

in 1892, Procter and Gamble invited the public to submit rhymes to advertise Ivory Soap.

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.

Truth be told, the reality show itself quickly degenerated into a televisual soap opera that was not that different than old variety shows made for large audiences. And its audience was amplified at the usual rate of competing media, which leads to the self- propagation of the show via a prophetic method: self-fulfilling prophecy. In the end, the ratings for the show play part of the spiral and return cycle of the advertising flame. But all of this is of little interest. It is only the original idea which has any value: submitting a group to a sensory deprivation experiment ( Which in other times was a form of calculated torture. But are we not in the middle of exploring all the historical forms of torture, served in homeopathic doses, under the guise of mass culture or avant-garde art? This is precisely one of the principle themes of contemporary art.), in order to record the behavior of human molecules within a vacuum - and no doubt with the design of watching them tear each other apart in the artificial promiscuity. We have not yet reached this point, but this existential micro-situation functions as a universal metaphor for the modern being, holed up in his personal loft, which is no longer his physical or mental universe. It is his digital and tactile universe, of Turing’s “spectral body”, of the digital man, captured within the labyrinth of the networks, of man turned into his own (white) mouse.

The term “engagement” is part of the familiar, sanitized language that hides how stupid a machine we have built. We must start using terms like “addiction” and “behavior modification.” Here’s another example of sanitized language: We still call the customers of social media companies “advertisers”—and, to be fair, many of them are. They want you to buy a particular brand of soap or something. But they might also be nasty, hidden creeps who want to undermine democracy. So I prefer to call this class of person a manipulator.

The basic discounter’s idea was to attract customers into the store by pricing these items—toothpaste, mouthwash, headache remedies, soap, shampoo—right down at cost. Those were what the early discounters called your “image” items. That’s what you pushed in your newspaper advertising—like the twenty-seven-cent Crest at Springdale—and you stacked it high in the stores to call attention to what a great deal it was. Word would get around that you had really low prices. Everything else in the store was priced low too, but it had a 30 percent margin. Health and beauty aids were priced to give away. As

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.

Where, Bredon asked himself, did the money come from that was to be spent so variously and so lavishly? If this hell’s-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria

Television networks were getting tight with free broadcast time because pictures of guys floating in zero gravity and bunny-hopping around on the Moon were not competing well with soap powder, beer and toothpaste advertisements.

Key Elements of Five Year Plan ’77 What follows did not happen overnight. Among the guidelines set in February 1977 (remember, Fair Trade on alcohol was not finally ended until 1978): Emphasize edibles vs. non-edibles. I figured that the supermarkets would raise their prices on foods to make up for the newly reduced margins on milk and alcohol. This would give us all the more room to underprice them. During the next five years we got rid of film, hosiery, light bulbs and hardware, greeting cards, batteries, magazines, all health and beauty aids except those with a “health food” twist. We began to cut back sharply on soaps and cleaners and paper goods. The only non-edibles we emphasized were “tabletop” items like wineglasses, cork pullers, and candles. It was quite clear that we should put more emphasis on food and less on alcohol and milk. Within edibles, drop all ordinary branded products like Best Foods, Folgers, or Weber’s bread. I felt that a dichotomy was developing between “groceries” and “food.” By “groceries,” I mean the highly advertised, highly packaged, “value added” products being emphasized by supermarkets, the kinds that brought slotting allowances and co-op advertising allowances. By embracing these “plastic” products, I felt the supermarkets were abandoning “food” and the product knowledge required to buy and sell it. But this position wasn’t entirely altruistic. The plan of February 20, 1977, declared, “Most independent supermarkets have been driven out of business, because they stupidly tried to compete with the big chains in plastic goods, in which the big chains excel.” Focus on discontinuity of supplies. Be willing to discontinue any product if we are unable to offer the right deal to the customer. Instead of national brands, focus on either Trader Joe’s label products or “no label” products like nuts and dried fruits. This was intended to enable the Trader Joe’s label to pick up momentum in the stores. And it worked.

No publisher. No agent. They had told him that sales had not been good. Markets had changed. Same old shit. Well, fuck them. Fuck them all. Something different was needed, apparently. Something original but easily pigeon-holed. Books by celebrities were very popular. Models, second-rate comedians, has-been soap stars (those that weren’t trying to make it in the music business), even footballers were writing books. Any talentless cunt with enough money to pay a ghost-writer and a good editor was capable of churning out a book and earning shit-loads of cash for it. And then there were the household names who milked their own brand of repetitious bullshit while fawning publishers knelt at their feet to push ever-larger cheques into their grasping hands. Add to these the comfortable middle-class writers who lectured on real life from the security of knowing it was a world they would never have to inhabit. People with millions in the bank who crowed that money wasn’t everything, who complained about invasion of privacy during their six-page interviews, who were proud of how they’d been single mothers or record-shop employees or advertising men before they’d made it big. And who whined about how hard they’d had to work to get published when all it took was a generous publisher and an even more generous publicity department. Ward despised them all. Even when he’d been successful he’d despised them. The whole fucking business stank. It stank of cowardice. Of duplicity. Of betrayal.

With great difficulty, Hall managed to extract Commander William James, who had been his second-in-command on Queen Mary. James had the nickname ‘Bubbles’, because it was well known in the navy that he had been, as a curly-haired child, the original for the famous Millais painting of the boy blowing soap bubbles, which was used eventually for advertising Pears Soap.