Post-war advertising shifted from selling products to manufacturing and commodifying desire.

Evidence

In an episode of Mad Men, the television series on the rise of advertising in the 1960s, the legendary creative director Don Draper coaches his protégée, Peggy, on how to think of Hershey, a chocolate bar that their firm is peddling. Draper’s marketing philosophy perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the times: ‘You are the product. You, feeling something.’ Or, as James Poniewozik interprets Draper’s line in Time magazine: ‘You don’t buy a Hershey bar for a couple of ounces of chocolate. You buy it to recapture the feeling of being loved that you knew when your dad bought you one for mowing the lawn.’ — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 119

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general attention-economy literature; the reader’s stated focus on attention/platforms. — connects to: Post-war capitalism discovered attention as a new market. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 126; Advertising shifted from promising cures to selling consumers a better version of themselves — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 213; Advertising manipulates consumers into wanting what they are made to want. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 258 (+7 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 119

Broader Connections

• Advertising manipulates consumers into wanting what they are made to want. #corroborates (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 258
• Advertising shifted from promising cures to selling consumers a better version of themselves #expands (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 213
• Advertising shifted from selling product qualities to selling user identity #corroborates (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 550
• Early twentieth-century advertising moved from persuasion to brand loyalty and conversion #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 204
• Market rhetoric shifted attention from production to consumption #expands (0.75)
• Mass production forced advertising to both create demand and manufacture brand reputation #expands (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 201