Nothing illustrates your point about marketeers targeting the vulnerable than spam, which is so stupid, on the surface, that you know that only one person in a thousand would be equally stupid enough to fall for it. Send out spam by the millions at almost no cost, and it becomes cost-effective to target the clueless.

Then there are the "evil genuises" of advertising, inheritors of the work of Joseph Goebbels. (Let's stop and think for a moment: When did Madison Avenue explode into the mainspring of the American economy? Right after WWII, wasn't it? What a coincidence...)

For a good time, try to engage Tom on the subject of unethical techniques in advertising. He's adamant that there could be no such thing, that business people are generally far too principled to stoop to such tricks and would rather compete honestly and aboveboard, and that the few bad apples will be punished by market forces. Most fascinating is all is Tom's assertion that he never sees, and has never seen, any sign of such techniques in use; and he himself has used the phrase "nobody's holding a gun my head". I figure that either his home is jammed to the rafters with things he doesn't remember acquiring, or maybe he's subjectively correct, and not even modern psychological manipulation can penetrate his neutronium-armored skull. Either way, it doesn't look good for good ole' TB.*

As for the faith in market forces punishing evildoers, that's nonsense. The market rewards profit and punishes loss, that's all; despite the religious reverence of conservatives for the free-market, it doesn't actually make moral judgments. If unscrupulous psychological manipulation works, the market rewards it and reinforces it.

(*--What's my excuse? Well, I've studied the techniques used in advertising for decades, ever since I read about the airbrushed ice cubes way back in the '70s. I see the manipulation, and compensate for it. I pay conscious attention to commercials to minimize their power to slip below my conscious radar. I don't claim to be invulnerable, but I think it's more realistic to say that my active defenses are working to some degree than to claim that there's no such thing as manipulation in advertising at all and you're safe if you just squeeze your eyes really tightly shut.)