> Advertising and branding used to be smart. It was witty, cohesive, and most importantly, it respected the intelligence and shrewdness of the consumer it was marketing to.<p>They really weren't. If you look at the examples they list, none of them rely on a particularly intelligent audience. Their wording preys on the insecurities of possessing wealth and coerces the viewer with lowest-common-denominator logic. They're insulting and smarmy, pretentious but zero-sum. I read through hundreds of issues of <i>Popular Mechanics</i> as a kid, and even back then I wasn't dumb enough to feel "witty" for parsing an advertisement's joke. Maybe that was more obvious in the context they were published.<p>What I find funny is that I see nostalgia for every age of branding like this. There are postwar idealists who think all modernity is sin, there are 60s and 70s obsessives that think every advertisement should be full-page and drenched in cigar smoke, and others yet that think the gaudy trappings of the 80s and 90s were the most humanist advertising got. They're all falling for the same illusion of "sophistication" that advertising has always lacked. The fact that the author seems to think branding ever had prestige is kinda a mea-culpa for their own outrageous outlook.