How advertising created a nation of entitled assholes

It’s over. I’m done.

For years, I’ve used The Cranky Creative to vent about the decline of the advertising industry. I’ve complained about the lazy concepts, the idiot creatives, the shallow metrics, and the never-ending noise of “content” (gah, how I hate that word). I thought the problem was just a lack of craft, a loss of respect for the audience, or the ascendancy of inept people high on their own egos.

I was wrong. The problem is far worse.

Advertising is not just broken; it’s a poison pill that has sickened the Western psyche and contributed to a full-on collapse of civility. I’m not just mad about the ads anymore; I’m infuriated by what advertising has made of us.

I’m talking about the mass production of entitled assholes.

Have it your way, asshole

We as a culture have become a perpetually furious mob of consumers with outsized, unreasonable expectations for everything. And we demand what we want now, exactly the way we want it.

Where did this entitlement come from? It was manufactured and pumped directly into our heads 200 times a day by the one industry whose only job is to shape desire and control expectation: advertising.

For decades, the constant messaging has been: You are special. You are always right. Your needs matter most. You have a right to have it all, right now.

When a billion-dollar industry uses its formidable psychological power to repeatedly tell you that the world and everyone in it revolves around your personal wants, it warps the mind. It creates an expectation that the polite, patient conduct required for a functional society — respect, responsibility, discipline, adherence to rules and laws — is totally optional. Or worse, obsolete.

Why should you care about your neighbor or the public good when the shiny screen tells you that you are the main character and your desires are all that matter?

Rewriting social reality

This psychological manipulation is evident in how the industry manufactures specific social dynamics on screen, starting with the absurd and blatant overrepresentation of black people in TV commercials.

Today, black people appear in three or four out of every five TV commercials, and when paired with white characters, they are almost exclusively portrayed as the wise, informed, and competent ones, there to patiently educate the clumsy, dim-witted white people.

This is not a reflection of reality. This is blatant, calculated pandering. Everyone sees this manipulative attempt to rewrite social dynamics on screen. But it is one more way advertising insists on telling the world who to be and what to believe, even if it has to manufacture a new social reality to do it.

Glamorizing idiocy and dysfunction

The decline in our national character is mirrored perfectly in the characters we see in TV commercials.

David Ogilvy famously championed “The Big Idea.” What has replaced it? Silly, contrived foolishness featuring dull, unattractive dopes doing dumb things for a laugh. The message isn’t subtle: Being dim-witted is endearing, even cool.

The intentional feminization of the Western male is another sign of the decay. The alpha male — a figure traditionally associated with competence and strength — has been branded “toxic” by progressive influences. As a result, today’s commercials have almost entirely removed strong male archetypes, replacing them with fumbling, bumbling, low-T goofballs.

Having actively participated in destroying masculine role models, the ad industry has left us with “beta male” as the default male identity. The message is clear: Weakness is a desirable trait in men.

The malice, however, runs deeper than just social engineering: advertising and its media ecosystem have successfully monetized our misery and dysfunction.

Monetizing misery

Last week, I saw a woman wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with — I kid you not — “MENTALLY ILL” across the back. A few days later, I saw a bumper sticker that read “Slightly Stoopid” and five minutes later, a sports jersey-style shirt proclaiming its wearer was “UNWELL.”

This is where we are now: Telling the world that you are a sick, depressed moron is no longer a plea for help; it’s a brand differentiator.

In a culture that has replaced values and character with superficiality and narcissism, dysfunction is the last frontier for self-identity. Advertising’s hunger to monetize everything — even personal instability — has turned mental health struggles and simple stupidity into marketable aesthetics. It’s the ultimate shirking of personal responsibility, proudly worn on a shirt: “I can’t be held accountable; I’m UNWELL. Suffer my brand of dysfunction.”

Unbelievable.

The normalization of unhealthy bodies

And it’s not just the mind that advertisers have decided to glamorize with dysfunction. Look at the recent emphasis on “body positivity” in ads. We are now routinely shown grossly obese, unhealthy, and even downright ugly people, normalizing what should be a call for concern. The intentional poisoning of our food supply is surely the main driver of this problem, but advertising is compounding it by celebrating a national character that is visibly unhealthy — bloated, puffy, and pear-shaped, like sick characters from some dystopic movie.

Advertising used to give us standards to aspire to. No more. Today, the ad world is actively normalizing and glamorizing unhealthy appearances, just as it does idiocy and mental instability.

The attention-span massacre

The damage advertising inflicts is not just moral or physical; it’s cognitive. The entire industry is now optimized for the shallow engagement of the lowest common denominator. Every piece of communication is a sharp, quick blast — the six-second skip, the fast-cut meme, the cheap dopamine hit. This trains our minds to demand constant speed and novelty, making the necessary slowness of serious reading, complex problem-solving, or deep conversation feel agonizingly boring.

The result is a national attention-deficit disorder. When people can only process information in tiny, easily digestible chunks, they become incapable of understanding complex political, scientific, or social issues, making them easy targets for low-effort emotional manipulation and fake news.

In short, advertising is ensuring that the masses are not only entitled, but functionally stupid and manipulable.

The industry’s final insults

Truly, the industry’s malice is exhaustive. Beyond the harms discussed above, advertising enforces the cult of obsolescence by shaming us into perpetual consumer debt just to replace perfectly good items (think phones, cars, and clothing), and it commodifies authenticity by stealing the language of dissent and non-conformity — even mental illness — and selling it back to us, ensuring no true rebellion can ever exist outside of a purchasable aesthetic.

If an ad tells you that your act of rebellion (like buying a certain brand of craft beer or wearing a particular slogan) is the way to be an “outsider,” you are not an outsider; you’re just a perfectly segmented consumer.

Nowhere to hide

We can’t even escape the noise at the beach anymore.

Yesterday, I was trying to enjoy the one place left where a person might find some peace — the beach. And what did I see? A big, ugly barge on the water, displaying a garish, lit billboard.

Fucking ads plastered right across one of the most gorgeous vistas in nature.

That barge is the perfect metaphor for today’s ad industry. It’s loud, it’s obnoxious, it violates boundaries, and it exists only to distract us with garbage we don’t need while cheapening everything in life that actually is beautiful or important.

A very Cranky pivot: Look what they’ve been hiding

This is the legacy of modern marketing: a Planet of the Apes scenario where the apes bought the t-shirt. The industry has succeeded in its prime objective — to shape our desires — but in doing so, it has made us miserable, stupid, and weak. The only way to win the game is to stop playing and find something worth looking at that isn’t for sale.

For too long, I have wasted energy critiquing the smarmy and increasingly obnoxious antics of the ad industry. Today, I detest the industry not only for its poor craft, but for the agenda of deception that these ads protect. While we’ve been distracted by the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the endless, trivial pursuit of our 15 minutes of fame, the people with real power have been quietly, systematically manipulating us.

This is no longer about a bad TV spot. This is about waking up and saving ourselves from propaganda in all its forms, whether it comes from brands, celebrities, the media, or the government. As the Cranky Creative, I am no longer interested in the ad industry’s glossy, empty promises. Future posts, however many there may be, will focus on truth-telling: opening people’s eyes to the poisonous lies, propaganda, and fake news we’ve all been led to believe — such as the decidedly unsafe and ineffective jab-jab-jabs, the deliberate poisoning of our food supply, and more.

It’s time to look up from the shiny distractions and see what they’ve been hiding while we were busy consuming.

Rob Rhode is a former marketing copywriter and founder of The Cranky Creative, a blog so triggering to the LinkedIn elite that he’s been called “divisive” (and worse). He’s never been invited to an industry cocktail party, but his blog has been read by millions and his insights have appeared in major books and newspapers. He’s happy to piss off the right people.

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