-- For the record, this is not what marketing professionals do. What you are talking about is somewhere between black-hat advertising and lifestyle advertising

-- For the record, this is not what marketing professionals do. What you are talking about is somewhere between black-hat advertising and lifestyle advertising (which is much deeper than "manipulation"). -- Marketing professionals absolutely use manipulative predatory tactics like that on the people they are trying to convince to buy their products. Just because you nonsensically try to suggest otherwise, doesn't magically make it so. What's even less shocking is that it has real limitations in that, once trust is lost by a bad actor in one area of marketing, all other areas are suddenly seen as untrustworthy as well. That is the reason marketing only tends to work on younger people with little to no previous experience being targeted for the hard sell. You can't distance yourself from people who use predatory advertising as a means to increase the "awarenes" metric any more than you can claim marketing isn't actually selling anything.....