Daily Inspiration Quote by Jef I. Richards

Richards lands a neat inversion: the people most suspicious of advertising often grant it the godlike power they claim to resist. The line isn’t defending ad men as saints; it’s puncturing a popular superstition that commercials are a kind of mind-control ray. By wishing consumers were as “gullible” as critics, he mocks the critic’s own credulity: if you truly think a 30-second spot can reliably bend human behavior, you’re already primed to believe in simple, monocausal explanations for messy social outcomes.

The intent is partly disciplinary. As a professor, Richards is pushing back against a recurring moral panic in media culture and academia: that persuasion equals manipulation, that exposure equals conversion. The subtext is a demand for intellectual humility. Advertising can shape attention, set agendas, normalize desires, and grease decisions at the margins. It’s powerful in the way weather is powerful: it influences conditions, it doesn’t dictate every move. Critics who talk as if ads “make” people buy are often outsourcing responsibility, turning consumers into passive victims and corporations into omnipotent villains. That’s rhetorically convenient and politically mobilizing, but analytically lazy.

Contextually, the quote sits inside decades of debate between “strong effects” models of media (the hypodermic needle fantasy) and research showing mixed, contingent effects mediated by identity, price, habit, peer groups, and sheer inconvenience. Richards’ jab is a reminder that believing in advertising’s total power is itself a kind of faith - and faith is the easiest thing in the world to sell.