This deep dive is our monthly love letter to the community. We keep it free for everyone because knowledge on commercial influence should be accessible.
Isn’t that just good marketing?
A few years ago, I presented at the annual American Public Health Association (APHA) conference on the misleading marketing practices of Guatemala’s chicken industry. I shared how corporations that sell products made from broilers raised in factory farms were using images of free-roaming chickens raised in backyards on their packaging, advertisements, and social media. I detailed how global brands headquartered in the U.S. and Europe that sourced chicken meat from countries like El Salvador used the word “criolla” for their packaged soups and seasonings, manufacturing the perception that the products contained heritage, backyard chicken from Guatemala, which is what criolla means to local people. I showed how marketing portrayed indigenous women’s chicken production as dirty and unsafe in order to position industrial products as “cleaner”, more “trustworthy” alternatives.
I then showed how all of these claims were unsupported by scientific evidence. I argued that the words, symbols, and pictures that broiler companies co-opted from indigenous chicken production trick consumers into thinking they’re buying a free range, local chicken product. I also argued that these claims unfairly take away market share from indigenous women’s genuinely home-grown birds, undermining the very way of life of Mayan people in Guatemala. And both consumers and producers are supposed to be protected by the country’s misleading advertising laws.
“Isn’t that just good marketing, though?” asked an audience member who identified himself as hailing from the livestock industry. I was slightly taken aback by an industry rep attending the country’s biggest public health conference. I was more taken aback by his question as I wasn’t expecting someone to wave off the evidence I presented with a sort of “yeah, but boys will be boys” attitude towards problematic marketing practices.
No sir, it’s bad marketing
I can’t remember exactly what I answered that day. I think I just reiterated some of my earlier points. Unfortunately, on that occasion, as it often does, my best response came to me well after the conversation was over.
I now know what I wish I’d said:
“While corporate marketing’s goal is to sell more products (and to shape beliefs, attitudes, and policies so that they can sell us even more stuff), most people seem to agree that we are not OK with being misled. We are not OK with marketing making us buy something other than what we think we’re buying, and we are not OK with it unfairly hurting sellers that actually do deliver on their promises. That’s why Guatemala has laws protecting consumers and producers from false advertising, as does the United States, along with over 100 other countries. Together, much of the world seems to think it’s pretty wrong for marketing to be deceptive and manipulative. So, no, sir. It isn’t “just good marketing.” It’s bad marketing. It’s unethical, illegal, and harmful.”
You might be thinking that the chicken ad examples are not that bad. And sure, it’s unlikely that any people will die because of those particular marketing tactics. But deceptive and manipulative marketing practices and the harmful outcomes they yield lie on a spectrum, and the field of commercial determinants shows us that marketing can, indeed, kill.
Marketing contains multitudes
But before we dive into that, know that there’s more to marketing than advertising. In fact, there’s a lot more to marketing than meets the eye. And marketing’s a lot more present in our daily lives than we know.
Marketing has always been more than obvious advertising on billboards, television, or print media (see Edward Bernays’ 1928 treatise on corporate propaganda for examples of the variety of marketing tactics used for well over a century from the grandfather of modern PR). Yet, today, marketing—business activities or features whose goal is to sell—is so much of what consumer goods and services companies do: from product design to packaging; from pricing strategies to content, social media, and native platform, gaming, and virtual reality advertising and influencing; and from charitable, educational, and corporate social responsibility programs to corporate political activity. Researchers conceptualize this breadth of marketing as the four P’s: product, place, promotion, and price. And it’s incredibly sophisticated, based as it is, increasingly, openly, and unabashedly, on exploiting our cognitive, emotional, and social biases in a way that has been supercharged by social media and AI.
The case of infant formula shows us how extensive yet covert marketing is these days. Angus et al (2020) detail the grooming process formula companies unleash on unsuspecting soon-to-be mothers around the world. One example of the long game the industry plays is designing and distributing “free” pregnancy and baby community apps to build trust throughout the pregnancy journey. At the same time, crucially, the companies collect personal data, like each mother’s baby’s due date, in order to-–at just the right, perfectly calibrated moments—subtly influence her in the direction of using formula instead of breastfeeding. Another tactic is using doctors, nurses, hospitals, and clinics to give out free formula samples to powerfully suggest these trusted providers’ and institutions’ tacit product endorsement. A third is marketing the exact same product at different price points (an illegal and unethical practice) to different female audiences using different packaging and tailored emotional cues based on their parenting style.
When marketing kills
While the marketing in the Guatemala chicken example may not be responsible for deaths, the infant formula example is different. Industrial baby formula is a vital product for women that are unable, for one reason or another, to breastfeed. However, marketing by the breast milk substitutes (BMS) industry is harmful when it convinces millions to not breastfeed when they otherwise could and would. Marketing has been proven to encourage formula consumption, and, as a result, global markets for BMS products reached over U.S.$70 billion by 2019. While only 40% of women around the world now follow World Health Organization’s breastfeeding guidelines, the public health group estimates that if all babies were breastfed - not formula fed - 800,000 infant deaths would be avoided each year.
We see how marketing kills even more clearly in the development, promotion, and sale of undoubtedly harmful products. It’s unlikely that large portions of the population would take up and continue smoking, drinking, or gambling if it wasn’t for marketing. The products are designed to be addictive and aggressively promoted for widespread adoption.
Think of the deceptive marketing that suggested that flavored Juul products were safe, and the brand’s influencer marketing that sexualized young women. These practices helped hook more than 2.5 million American middle- and high-schoolers on vapes by 2022. Or glance around right now and see how the online betting industry lures people in with ads that offer free bets and promise endless fun to help spread gambling like wildfire through our communities.
As a result, many of the deaths attributable to the consumption of harmful products can be laid at the doors of the marketing departments of harmful industries and their contracted marketing agencies. In 2024, the WHO estimated that globally just four corporate product categories – tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, and fossil fuels – caused 19 million deaths per year, or 34% of all deaths. More recently, in 2026, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that a different combination of five heavily-marketed commercial products—tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, manufactured chemicals, and pesticides—is responsible for 31% of all global deaths. These estimates do not even take into account mortality from other lethal industries like firearms.
But can you really prove that marketing causes consumption that leads to deaths?
Part of the corporate narrative playbook that industries deploy once people push for restrictions on the marketing and sale of harmful products, is to claim that there is no causal link between their marketing and people’s consumption of their products. For example, in the 1999 U.S. vs Phillip Morris case, the company famously reframed the observed scientific correlation between adolescents’ exposure to cigarette advertising and their subsequent smoking. The tobacco giant claimed that the association was simply due to the children’s pre-existing interest in cigarettes.
The claim that marketing does not cause people to buy and consume the marketed products is ridiculous even on its face. In 2025, total marketing spending in the U.S. surpassed $600 billion. This is not a number we’d expect to see if marketing wasn’t effective at its job of selling as global corporations are not exactly in the business of wasting money on activities that don’t help generate profits.
The claim is also undermined by how hard industries, like tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food, work to prevent laws that restrict their marketing activities. Businesses know that mandates for more truthful packaging, higher prices, and restrictions on where, how, how much, and to whom companies can market are incredibly effective at reducing harmful product consumption. Companies do everything in their power to stop them, including deploying extensive marketing campaigns to convince us to not tax their products or restrict their marketing, which is ironically…, a tax-deductible business expense in the U.S.
Finally, the claim that marketing can’t be blamed for people’s consumption of harmful products is consistently debunked by evidence. Westling et al., 2025, for example, summarize the research showing how marketing by six industries—tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, processed food, firearm, and fossil fuel—is causally linked to the occurrence of injury, disease, and premature death. According to the authors, in the U.S., this harmful marketing directly contributes to 1 million deaths each year. Around the world, just as the BMS industry has done with expecting mothers, marketers of unhealthy products often take targeted approaches to “develop new consumers” of children and youth, racial and ethnic groups, and women, further causally harming vulnerable groups. For example, using and reinforcing gendered stereotypes to encourage women to increasingly take up consumption of unhealthy commodities.
When marketing hurts kids
We can hold marketing accountable for other harms too, like those brought to children from social media companies that knowingly compromise on safety precautions in their pursuit of advertising revenue. On March 24, 2026, Meta Platforms lost a historic court case in New Mexico, where it was ordered to pay out a $375 million penalty for misleading parents and letting predators target children on Facebook and Instagram. The very next day, in another landmark case, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube guilty of causing a user’s mental health distress through addicting platform designs that her lawyers argued were akin to cigarettes and online gambling.
When marketing makes us think we’re ‘sick’
Then there are less obvious harms. Pharmaceutical marketing, for example, has been shown to use unethical practices, like misrepresenting scientific evidence on the prevalence and urgency of conditions, to convince consumers and doctors alike that there is a great need for a new drug. In decades past, ordinary, relatively benign ailments of life like baldness, erectile dysfunction, irritable bowel syndrome, social phobia, and osteoporosis have been constructed by corporate marketing as serious widespread medical problems in need of commercial pharmacological solutions.
Much of today’s wellness industry is based on such “disease mongering” marketing tactics. As a result, many people are variably harmed by consuming lightly regulated supplement products and other unnecessary or unproven wellness products and services. After all, “a lot of money can be made from telling healthy people they’re sick” or that their bodies are lacking something that can be fixed with a simple purchase.
When marketing hurts our wallets
Marketing hurts our financial wellbeing too. Physical stores have for decades been designed to shape shopper decision making, like maximize the possibility of impulse buying (think unhealthy but tempting last minute items at the check out) and parents succumbing to their children’s “pester power” (think brightly packaged foods and drinks adorning cartoon characters at lower eye-levels). Researchers have also now identified almost 2,000 distinct online “dark patterns”, i.e., tricks that make users do things they don’t mean to do. This includes dark marketing nudges designed specifically to push us to buy as much as possible as impulsively as possible. For instance, you experience false urgency with every fake “buy in the next 30 seconds to lock in the price” message, false scarcity every time a website emptily warns you that there “only 3 left in stock” of the item you’re considering, and fake social proof when you’re fed bogus reviews, testimonials, or paid but undisclosed influencer, celebrity, or media endorsement. Of course you won’t know it’s fake, and that’s what makes the patterns “dark.”
Marketing nudged impulse shopping racks up an estimated $18 billion a year in sales. While marketing sludge makes it incredibly hard, sometimes impossible, to return regretted purchases or to unlist from unwanted subscriptions. With regulations sluggish to keep up with inventive marketing schemes and legal accountability expensive and inaccessible across country borders in a global online marketplace, millions of people are swindled out of billions of dollars each year, hurting the poorest the most.
When marketing harms the planet
And that’s not to mention the direct planetary effects of physical and digital marketing. In 2023, over 100 billion pieces of physical junk mail used up to 100 million trees, generated 1 billion pounds of landfill waste, and pumped 51 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to chopping down a forest the size of New York City to make junk mail that people put in the trash that then fills 5,000 baseball stadium’s worth of landfill and releases more than 50 times more toxic gases than all of America’s domestic travel… every single year.
The emphasis on digital communications in recent decades does not circumvent the environmental impact of marketing either. A typical digital ad campaign generates roughly 71 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s roughly equal to 35 round trip flights between New York City and Paris. With AI tools like ChatGPT now testing showing free and lower-tier subscribers ads and with many new powerful and power-hungry AI marketing tools now available means the environmental impact of marketing is only growing.
In defense of (some) marketing
Businesses have a right to tell the public about their products and services. Marketing is one tool they can use to do that. Marketing can also be effectively used for pro-social purposes, like public health campaigns and non-profit drives.
Marketing does not have to be harmful. Plenty of people in the commercial world promote ethical codes of conduct that avoid deception and manipulation, call for transformative advertising research that seeks to do good in the world, and call on the marketing profession to align its practices with morality (including when it comes to selling harmful products). But it’s how most marketing is currently done, the harmful purposes that it's used for, and the negative impacts it brings about that need our attention.
In defense of (some) marketers
Many marketers unapologetically take advantage of our mental machinery to peddle harmful products, chalking it all down to “the costs of business.” Some marketers might not be aware of the ethical issues involved. Others might be conflicted about their profession’s practices’ race to the bottom, but feel that they aren’t in the position to do anything about them.
We should all be empathetic to the key-performance-indicator-driven incentive systems and hierarchical power dynamics that corporate marketers find themselves in. Even if they are aware of the harms of their companies’ marketing schemes and want the businesses to change, many likely feel too scared or powerless to act. That’s one reason why we learn about some of the most egregious marketing harms from industry whistleblowers who speak out at great professional and personal cost – think Cambridge Analytica and Meta scandals.
Many marketing jobs reward practices that drive sales, regardless of whether the practices are transparent or hidden, straightforward or manipulative, honest or deceptive. The marketer’s purpose is to sell regardless of whether the consumption of the products and services cause moral injury of being duped, hurt economically (whether consumers or producers), or damage our health or the environment. It can be hard to fight those larger structures one marketer at a time, although it does not mean that marketers shouldn’t try. The incentives, power systems, and business priorities will need to shift to change these dynamics on a bigger scale (we’ll get into that and personal marketing resistance strategies all of us can employ next week).
Acting on marketing matters for social change
Marketing impacts what we buy, what we consume, what we do, how we see ourselves, and what policies we support. It has an increasingly oversized impact on our world. It’s at the core of today’s business models. And it’s a major player in driving commercially determined harms. Those of us working to improve the human condition ignore our collective marketing environment at our peril, and we’ll get into what to do about it next week too.
We do not run ads and we do not take corporate sponsors. Paid subscribers, founding members, and tippers help us stay independent and keep these deep dives open for all.
By Edwards Bernays, H. Liveright Press, 1928
Propaganda offers one of the most generous and optimistic accounts of marketing, advertising, and corporate public relations you’ll ever encounter. Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) drew on psychology and the social sciences to argue that corporate manipulation of the public mind is not only inevitable but essential to mass consumption, politics, and democracy itself. In his rosy portrayal, “ethical” marketing has a very narrow meaning; Bernays was perfectly comfortable with manipulation so long as it served what he considered the public good, a vision defined by a small cadre of privileged, elite (and overwhelmingly male) social engineers. Despite its clear biases, the short book remains a fascinating historical document.
By Erica Westling and five authors in Prevention Science, 2025
Harmful Marketing, on the other hand, offers one of the most damning accounts of marketing you’re likely to find. The authors “summarize evidence that marketing practices in six industries (tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, processed food, firearm, and fossil fuel) are causal influences on the occurrence of injury, disease, and premature death.” The paper takes one industry at a time, first walking the reader through current statistics of prevalence and market worth of those industries juxtaposed against the harms associated with them; then showing how it effectively markets to increase uptake of the products; finishing with how each industry fights back against common sense public actions. The concluding sections share ideas for what to do about harmful marketing.
By Gerard Hastings and three authors in Globalization & Health
Selling Second Best also offers a devastating account of the inner workings of the global Breast Milk Substitute (BMS) industry. The authors conduct a mixture of analysis of business databases and interviews with marketing practitioners, including those who had previously worked in formula marketing. The interviews in particular yield a rare inside glimpse into the tactics, techniques, and lack of ethical care in the industry’s marketing work. The authors conclude that the “formula industry is dominated by a small number of extremely powerful multinational corporations…[whose] mix of fiscal power, sophisticated marketing, and single-mindedness is causing great harm to public health.”