Advertising is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

Allen’s quip satirizes the advertising business by reducing it to a lopsided formula: most of what audiences encounter is muddle—noise, hype, and mixed messages—while only a small remainder is the hard-nosed motive of getting paid. The joke works by flipping the industry’s self-image (clarity, persuasion, creativity) into a portrait of deliberate or inevitable confusion, with “commission” standing in for the commercial incentive that drives the whole enterprise. It also reflects Allen’s broader comedic style: puncturing modern mass culture and its salesmanship with mock-statistical precision.