The success of Adbusters produced in B.C. leads me to think that its 
time to expose some of McLuhan's remarks on Advertising. The 
moralistic attitide characteristic of "the Mechanical Bride"
was gradually replaced by a more sympatheric view of the process.

gs


Selected Probes on Advertising

The Graphic Revolution, by which a private image
can be showered on the world overnight, scrambles
and confuses all pre-electric categories of fame
and greatness.  But it also increases the demand
for big names and big images.  Let us keep in
mind that the new reality is in the image and 
not behind it.
The Electronic Age - the Age of Implosion, 1962, p. 196


More art and intelligence go into the design and
lay-out of an ad in the SaturdayEvening Post
or Life than into stories and features in the same 
magazines.
The Age of Advertising, 1953, p. 556

Beyond a certain level of information,
advertising takes over from the product 
altogether, so that people actually consult
the ads to know how to feel about 
any given thing.  It's like reading Pater
on the Mona Lisa.  He tells you what to
feel about it.
Mademoiselle  interview, p. 115, 1967

That is the paradox of our ads.  They are the
transitional form of paidlearning. They provide
the newspaper or the TV show as a bonus, 
as paid learning.  They are the avant-garde of the
world set up as a seamless web by electric technology.
Prospect, 1962, p. 366


What the advertisers have discovered is
simply that new media of communication are
themselves magical art forms.  All art is in
a sense magical in that it produces a change
or metamorphosis in the spectator. It refashions his 
experience.
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954, p. 59

In America the lay-out and design man for an
ad might be a very great artist and
nobody would ever discover it.  We are so
ashamed of our commercial activities
that we refuse to inspect our world for any
symptoms of virtue or beauty which, 
we feel, could only creep into it by accident.
The Age of Advertising, 1953, p. 556.


The quest for the romantic image had been a
steady progression from a concern with diverse outer
landscapes and incidents to an inclusive, inner 
landscape or symbolic structure. Today the
hucksters have taken up the same quest, and so
far as the American dream is concerned, the
dream of the open society and of the
open road, that too was an outer landscape,
which has gone the way of picturesque poetry
into the dustbin of obsolescent equipment.
 Prospect of America, 1962, p. 107