Back in the day, when the first nazis were still around, they used propaganda as a neutral word and thought of persuasive mass communication as a good thing. I

Back in the day, when the first nazis were still around, they used propaganda as a neutral word and thought of persuasive mass communication as a good thing. It's related to a progressivist and modern view of societies being at different points of the same trajectory between primitive and advanced, or later, developing and developed. Forcing mass communication on people brought their primitive minds to a better state, they thought. During the postwar period mass communication was honed by academics and married private capital, producing somewhat scientific marketing disciplines optimising for efficiency in changing people's minds at scale. Puppet theaters as mass communication wouldn't have survived that if they were still around. Seeing similarities with advertising is rather easy even without this historic connection.