The great advertising con: selling illusions to corporations

They walk into the room with the confidence of revolutionaries and the vocabulary of half-read philosophers. They talk about “sentiment” , “brand love” and “immersive storytelling experiences” as if they were curing cancer, not pitching a deodorant ad. Welcome to the world of advertising and marketing — where smoke and mirrors are sold as vision, and inflated egos outshine actual results.

The snake oil hasn’t vanished; it’s just rebranded, dressed up in pitch decks and brand books, peddled not from wooden carts but from overpriced coworking spaces with exposed brick walls and overpriced espresso.

Advertising: where creativity dies of pretension

Once considered a creative field, advertising has largely become a parody of itself. Agencies promise to inject “soul” into brands while recycling the same 10 templates from last year’s Cannes Lions winners. They sell emotional impact with zero depth, praising their own work before the market ever sees it.

And when campaigns flop? It’s never their fault. The client “lacked vision”. The consumer “wasn’t ready”. The budget “wasn’t enough”. There's always a rationalization, never accountability.

In their world, buzzwords are currency. If it sounds impressive, it must be correct. No idea is too dumb if you can call it “disruptive”, no failure too obvious if wrapped in enough “ideation sessions” and “value mapping”.

Charlatans of the digital age

Let’s be honest: most people in this world have no idea what they’re actually doing. They’re performers — good at selling themselves, excellent at weaving narratives out of thin air. They master the illusion of productivity and insight, but behind the scenes, it’s all vague posturing.

Need a new visual identity? They'll give you six mockups with four-syllable names and color schemes inspired by “post-pandemic optimism”, Ask for an actual return on investment or user engagement, and the conversation will pivot to “brand positioning” or “long-term awareness”.

The truth is: most modern ad campaigns exist to win awards — not to serve clients. And clients have learned to smile and nod, afraid of looking “old school” if they question the Emperor’s new keynote.

Enter the corporate marketing department: same cult, new uniform

The rot doesn’t stop with agencies. Step inside any mid-to-large-sized company, and you’ll find the same mentality growing in-house. Marketing departments have become kingdoms within organizations, wielding disproportionate influence over budgets, decision-making, and direction.

Need to launch a product update? Marketing has to “approve” the messaging, the visuals, the tone — even the functionality sometimes. Never mind that they’ve never touched the code or spoken to a user.

Worse, they operate like an occupying force in meetings, dictating deliverables to engineering, sales, and design teams while contributing little more than aesthetic jargon and alignment charts.

The cost? Delay. Frustration. Mediocrity. Projects built to impress marketing, not the market.

The cult of image over substance

The root of the problem is simple: appearance has replaced substance.

Marketing sells the illusion of momentum. Agencies sell the illusion of expertise. Both rely on the client or employer buying into a shared fantasy: that abstract storytelling matters more than tangible results.

When departments become obsessed with perception over function, they stop listening. They stop iterating. They protect their narratives rather than explore better ones. And slowly, they become bottlenecks.

Somewhere along the way, the mission changes from communicating value to manufacturing prestige.

The real cost

The cost isn’t just money. It’s innovation that dies in review meetings. It’s developers who burn out building features nobody uses. It’s founders who start doubting themselves because a marketing VP said the product wasn’t “emotionally sticky”.

And the worst part? The system rewards the behavior. Because to the outside world, branding is easier to evaluate than actual progress. It’s much easier to admire a polished landing page than to measure code quality or usability.

In that environment, marketing becomes the hero — even when it’s quietly suffocating the rest of the organization.

Who’s to blame?

It’s not just the marketers or the agencies. It’s the entire industry’s willingness to prioritize polish over product, to hire for charisma over competence, to confuse talking about work with doing the work. It’s a system built to reward short-term metrics, appearances, and viral potential — not depth, authenticity, or value.

We’ve allowed an entire economy to emerge where people who don’t understand the product dictate how it should be presented, sold, and even built.

We need a reset. Not a rebrand. A real reset.

Creativity should serve clarity, not confusion. Marketing should support development, not dictate it. Agencies should prove their worth not with mood boards and slogans, but with real, measurable value.

And as consumers, we should stop falling for the noise. Stop believing every campaign that sells you empowerment while pushing the same recycled nonsense. Stop treating ads like art and marketers like visionaries. Somewhere between the pitch decks and the KPIs, we’ve lost the plot.

It’s time to take it back.