[ameister14]

Yeah, the problem with that is it's a completely flawed premise.

"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them."

No, it isn't. It's an expansion of the idea that people are more likely to buy things they have heard of. If it was just to connect people with what they already want to buy, there would be no product development, no product roll-outs, because people don't know they want to buy something that has never existed before.

Also 'over time it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest' is a joke. It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.

[dwaltrip]

You are being a bit pedantic and misdirectional with that first quote. It's not an important thesis of the article that people already know about the products ahead of time.

In no way have you demonstrated a "completely flawed premise".

> It's been dishonest since the start

How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?

[ameister14]

Firstly, I don't think it's unnecessarily pedantic to say that the origins of advertising and what they are for are not what he says they are.

>How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?

Because if your argument is that advertising is becoming or has become dishonest and manipulative and it needs to be pulled back to what it was before, that is a lot weaker if advertising has always been dishonest and manipulative.

[Zeklandia]

> It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.

If those are harmful practices, why would someone turn them into a business venture? To profit off of evil? Making something into a profitable business does not cleanse an activity of morality.

There is also a significant difference between saying you have found a magic bullet for all illnesses and saying you have discovered a specific treatment for specific diseases and had the treatment studied by independent experts to characterize its positive and negative effects in detail. Trying to convince people they need something (advertising) is manipulative, but informing people of something they might need is not.