Advertising must have been around as long as merchants have been selling their goods at the bazaar. They had to tell their customers about their product and they had to persuade them to buy it and not their competitors'. Honest merchants kept their advertising truthful, probably even the dishonest ones did too, their reputation and future sales were at stake. It was like making sure your scale was fair, or ensuring that the salted fish at the bottom of the barrel were fresher than the ones near the top, so that the buyer would not get a nasty surprise halfway through and change vendors. This is the market at work the way it's supposed to.

Marketing is very different, it rarely talks about the product, it's cost or specifications, it sells its mystique. It has divorced the process of production from the marketplace, and modern marketing is carried out by specialized professionals with no knowledge about or loyalty to a company or a product or an industry; they will work for your competitor just as easily as they work for you. So what reason should we have to trust them? Like modern political advisers, they have no preferred ideology, they just care about winning. Marketeers are the business equivalent of lawyers.

Modern communications, transport and the rise of a consumer economy, as well as the uniformity of mass production methods, have made the task of the advertiser very different. The marketer's task is not to get someone to buy your product, but to convince him he needs it in the first place. The demographic and its expected spending power has already been determined ahead of time by other marketing specialists. The stress now is on intangible, cultural values of the product (is it cool?) and on imagined benefits of innovation and cosmetic trim. Even the concept of "product" is being turned on its head. You don't buy a "thing" and use it 'til it wears out, you lease an "experience" and upgrade it when it's obsolete. Computer hardware is practically indestructible, and software, for example, NEVER wears out, but we are constantly upgrading them and installing new versions. We don't buy these things, we subscribe to them. We never stop paying for them. Over and over and over. And have you noticed how hard it is to unsubscribe?

Sure, innovation and improvements in reliabilty and performance certainly are benefits of new technology, but the marketing rarely metions this. It creates new needs it can fill, and this works best with the young who are vulnerable to this. The entire consumer economy is turning into an analogue of the fashion industry...mauve and taupe are the "in" colors for fall this year, baby!