"Telling lies does not work in advertising"
About this Quote
Advertising runs on fantasy, so Lec's line lands like a slap: not moralizing, just a cold diagnosis. As a poet of aphorisms who lived through propaganda-soaked decades in Poland, he knew the difference between persuasion and falsification. "Telling lies does not work" reads less like optimism about consumers and more like contempt for the people who think they can win by insulting reality.
The subtext is that advertising doesn't fail because it is insincere; it fails when it is stupidly insincere. A good ad can exaggerate, seduce, even mythologize, but it can't successfully demand that audiences deny their own senses. The product arrives. The body reacts. The bill comes due. Lec is pointing to the hard endpoint propaganda lacks: verification. Politics can postpone accountability with spectacle; consumer life keeps receipts.
There's also a sly, almost bureaucratic phrasing at work. He doesn't say lying is wrong or evil. He says it "does not work" - the language of efficiency, not ethics. That's the joke and the indictment: even judged by capitalism's own standard (results), lying is a bad strategy. Trust is a kind of infrastructure. Once a brand burns it, every subsequent claim becomes more expensive, louder, and less believable.
Read in Lec's historical context, the line doubles as an anti-authoritarian wink. If lies can't sell soap forever, they can't sell a regime forever either. The market isn't noble, but it is brutally empirical.
The subtext is that advertising doesn't fail because it is insincere; it fails when it is stupidly insincere. A good ad can exaggerate, seduce, even mythologize, but it can't successfully demand that audiences deny their own senses. The product arrives. The body reacts. The bill comes due. Lec is pointing to the hard endpoint propaganda lacks: verification. Politics can postpone accountability with spectacle; consumer life keeps receipts.
There's also a sly, almost bureaucratic phrasing at work. He doesn't say lying is wrong or evil. He says it "does not work" - the language of efficiency, not ethics. That's the joke and the indictment: even judged by capitalism's own standard (results), lying is a bad strategy. Trust is a kind of infrastructure. Once a brand burns it, every subsequent claim becomes more expensive, louder, and less believable.
Read in Lec's historical context, the line doubles as an anti-authoritarian wink. If lies can't sell soap forever, they can't sell a regime forever either. The market isn't noble, but it is brutally empirical.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marketing |
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