es, a great product will sell itself. The public will sniff it out and buy it - without the need for advertising. But this is where your argument falls apart: The truth is, most products aren’t that great. In fact, the vast majority of them have become commodity. A Dell is an HP which is no more than a Gateway. Same guts wrapped in an off-white box. Priced within inches. A fast food burger is a fast food burger. (Wendy’s makes a square one, um, brilliant.) Most affordable cars share the same parts and have ever so slightly different body styles. These wonderful products that will doom advertising you speak of, the products that sell themselves like the Apple iPhone and the Prius - are few and far between. Sadly, they are as rare as an advertising creative director with a small paycheck. The unfortunate fact is most products desperately need to be wrapped in something - anything - to make the consumer even notice them. To make people feel like they are “different” in some way. This is where advertising comes in. Creating desire where there otherwise would be none. In a capitalistic society where profit dictates product design, there will always be the need to help products appear - to be better than they are. I wish every company was capable of making breakthrough products that didn’t require an advertising crutch to sell them. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon - ivanandersson

this article is misconcieved. advertsing will never die, it just takes new forms. everything is becoming a medium anyway - the course the music industry is on is instructive - its going from being a product to a medium - and is hoping against hope that an advertising model can sustain it. User reviews drive sales. seeing what other people bought drives sales. Its all advertising. People doing stuff is advertising. If you mean the ad business is in trouble, you may well be right - though i think what will actually happen is that a lot of advertising creative types will end up building their work into products and services rather than ads, but they're still going to be employed. However this is NOT the same thing as saying that advertising will die. In the crappy history lesson you put together you ignored a whole load of fascinating study into the collective identity mass media created, of which advertising is an intrinsic part. Advertisng bad, culture good? If only it were that simple. Advertising IS culture, along with everything else people do that other people bear witness to. Also, you overstate the power of ads - most of the research i've seen shows that advertising is one of the weakest forces in consumer decision making, and was so even before the web revolution. Most campaigns don't even pay back. If all it took to get someone to buy cigarettes was to see an ad, the business would not be struggling for budgets. this seems a bit naive to me, sorry. — simon - ivanandersson