Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Schudson

Calling ad budgeting "essentially illogical" is less an insult than a diagnosis of how a powerful industry prefers to think about itself: scientific when it wants legitimacy, improvisational when it wants freedom. Schudson, writing as a sociologist, is pointing at the gap between advertising's self-myth (data-driven persuasion, measurable ROI, rational planning) and its daily operating reality (tradition, internal politics, and the anxiety of not knowing what actually works).

The intent is to demystify. Advertising is often sold as applied psychology with a spreadsheet attached; Schudson reframes it as a cultural practice shaped by institutional habit. Budgets get set by last year's spend, by what a rival is rumored to be doing, by the need to look ambitious to investors, by the calendar of product launches, by the agency's pitch. Those are "approaches", sure, but they aren't logical in the narrow economic sense of optimizing against reliable causal knowledge. The industry talks in the language of accountability while functioning in the fog of attribution.

The subtext is sharper: irrationality isn't a bug, it's a feature that protects discretion. If the causal chain between ad spend and consumer behavior is inherently messy, then executives and agencies can justify almost any number after the fact. "Illogical" becomes a polite way to name a ritual - a budget as social signal, a performance of seriousness, a defensive move against uncertainty.

Context matters because Schudson is part of a tradition that treats advertising not just as commerce but as a cultural institution. He’s reminding us that markets run on stories as much as on math, and ad budgets are one of the places that story gets paid for.