Life & Mortality Quote by Jef I. Richards

Calling the "death of advertising" a prophecied apocalypse is Richards at his driest, because he knows the phrase gets trotted out like a tech-industry rapture: one platform shift and the whole business supposedly collapses. His punchline is cleaner than it first appears. Advertising doesn’t die because it isn’t merely an industry; it’s a system that feeds on dissatisfaction. If the human animal ever became serenely content with body, face, clothes, even smell, the engine that turns insecurity into purchasing would stall. That’s the joke - and the indictment.

The Revelation reference does two things at once. It mocks the end-times rhetoric common in marketing discourse (every new medium is framed as extinction-level), and it quietly elevates the premise to something theological: total satisfaction is not just unlikely, it’s essentially supernatural. Richards is a professor, and you can hear the classroom logic underneath the humor: advertising thrives not on needs but on perceived gaps between who we are and who we’re told we could be.

The specific list - weight, hair, skin, wardrobe, aroma - is doing cultural work. It maps the modern self as a bundle of optimizable surfaces, a body treated like a perpetual beta product. Even "aroma" is telling: the most intimate, least visible form of self-management still gets monetized. Richards isn’t saying advertising creates all insecurity, but he’s blunt about its reliance on keeping the mirror slightly cruel.