Not liking advertising has a long history, certainly in America.

Both in the Progressive era when the

muckrakers exposed false marketing claims, and again during the Depression, when
corporations and advertisers were in bad odor, federal agencies were forged to police false
advertising.

Perhaps the most renowned critique of advertising and its manipulative powers was a book
written by Vance Packard, previously an author of such fluff magazine pieces as “How I Lost 15
Pounds in One Month.” Moved by a genuine sense of outrage, Packard published The Hidden
Persuaders in 1957, and it quickly shot up to number one on best-seller lists. He lambasted
advertisers for treating consumers as gullible children. The heart of Packard’s thesis was this:

This book is an attempt to explore a strange and rather exotic new area of American life. It is
about the large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking
habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from
psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of
awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, “hidden.” The result is that
many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of
our everyday lives.

David Ogilvy granted ammunition to critics of advertising when in a 1955 speech to the American
Association of Advertising Agencies he admitted, “There really isn’t any significant difference
between the various brands of whiskey, or the various cigarettes, or the various brands of
beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents and the
margarines and the automobiles. And, I might add, the different brands of salt.” The
difference, he said, is found in the advertising and the emotion it creates. Or as MediaLink’s
Wenda Millard says, “At its heart, advertising is about creating desire.” Creating desire is what
alarms James Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy
organization focused on the harm media can afflict on children. He worries about advertising
that promotes unhealthy sugary drinks or fast food, but he said his fear could be defined more
broadly: “The ubiquity of advertising can turn little children into overly commercial human
beings. They think of being defined by material things. Little kids don’t know the difference
between ads and programming. My twelve-year-old son constantly wants new sneakers.”

Wanton consumerism has forever been blamed on advertising. Michael Schudson, who taught a
course at the University of Chicago called Mass Media and Society, says he would freely assert in
class that advertising was usually ineffective. He was inspired to study the impact of advertising
because “I did not have an adequate response” to students who asked why companies would
spend so much on ads if they got little return. In the book he would write about the industry,
Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion,* Schudson explored advertising’s sins. He compared
advertising to the art of socialist realism because “it does not claim to picture reality as it is but
reality as it should be.” He labeled it “capitalist realism” and said ads are designed, whether
successful or not, to “subordinate” messy reality in order to spike sales of a product.
Among the hidden efforts of advertisers, critics most often latch on to how marketing
manipulates our emotions. Industry leaders don’t deny this, they extol it. Jack Haber, who
retired as CMO of Colgate in 2017, says, “I’m a believer that consumers make decisions emotion-
ally.” As proof he cites Daniel Kahneman’s esteemed best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, to
demonstrate that most human decisions pivot on emotion. “If you look at how people make
decisions to buy things, people make decisions emotionally. That’s why we try to build an
emotional connection to a brand.” Colgate spent $5 million for a thirty-second spot in the 2016
Super Bowl that didn’t mention tooth- paste but instead urged viewers to save water by not
leaving the water running. “Colgate is the most trusted brand in the world,” he says, and he
believes this Super Bowl ad reinforced the emotional connection people have with Colgate.

One of the most celebrated ads ever was the Coca-Cola commercial that was the final scene of
Mad Men. It featured children of all colors from around the world giving viewers goose bumps as
they harmonized on a hilltop:

I’d like to teach the world to sing In perfect harmony

I’d like to buy the world a Coke And keep it company
That’s the real thing

The ad tells nothing of the product, or its ingredients, or why it’s “the real thing.” Keith
Reinhard defends the ad and the emotions it evoked because “the ad is part of the brand
experience,” whatever that means. “We have always known, intuitively,” he explains, “that
people make their brand decisions—by the way, the same way they make their political
decisions—emotionally, with that lizard part of the brain, the reptilian part.” Marc Pritchard,
chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, tersely explained to an Advertising Week audience why
his product, Old Spice, had rebounded: The advertising for “Old Spice is about ridiculous
masculinity. And it works!”

It certainly worked for CBS, owner of broadcast rights for the February 2016 Super Bowl. The
annual event offers the biggest audience of the year to advertisers, which is why CBS was able
to charge up to $5 million for each spot. It was not exactly edifying fare. Bud Light had
comedians Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen paired up to disagree whether the nation was divided
this presidential year and to agree to canvas America to promote the “Bud Light Party.” Audi
was praised for its storytelling in their ad, “Commander,” in which an elderly, utterly depressed
former astronaut will not eat or talk and just stares ahead. His son enters the room, takes his
hand, they walk outside, and in the driveway is an Audi R8 sports car that can reach 205 miles
per hour. The father takes the keys, to the sound of David Bowie’s “Star- man,” and he
magically smiles. “There is no way for an Alzheimer’s family to watch this without gasping” in
shock, wrote MediaPost columnist Bob Garfield.

One explanation for advertising’s constant stretch to transfix audiences is that advertising is
really a form of show business. Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau
and a long- time student of advertising, suggests as much: “Contemporary advertising is based
on the deliberate, playful, wink-wink of P. T. Barnum. It’s based on the idea that if you shout
loud enough, tell clever enough stories, you can get people to do anything.” No question, many
marketing pitches are brilliant, and more than a few advance a social good, as P&G’s Ariel
detergent ads did in India, Unilever’s Vaseline did for Syrian refugees, Nike’s “If You Let Me
Play” ads did in promoting Title IX and girls participating in team sports, and as R/GA’s inspiring
antibias public service ad, “Love Has No Labels,” did. But if one acknowledges that many
marketing pitches are hyperbolic, then one holds hands with “truthful hyperbole,” the phrase
Donald Trump described in his book The Art of the Deal as “an innocent form of exaggeration—
and a very effective form of promotion.” From here, the distance to “alternative facts” is a
mere step or two.

So as is often the case, two opposing things are true at once: the social mobile data revolution
has made consumers more skeptical of advertising, even as ever more immersive and intimate
technologies have given advertising more and better purchase over our emotions. And we’ve
barely glimpsed the impact of virtual reality on the world of marketing. As Daniel J. Boorstin
famously wrote in his 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, “We risk
being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive,
so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” More than fifty years later, this is still not a comforting
thought.