In 100 Years, What Will They Say We Were Selling?
Every era of advertising reveals something about the civilisation that made it. Ours is no different. The question is whether we are paying attention to what we're revealing.
The Editors, etc. · 5 min read · From the Moon
Look at advertising from the 1950s long enough and a picture emerges. Not of the products — the cars, the cigarettes, the refrigerators — but of the anxieties underneath them. The need to belong. The fear of falling behind. The desperate, optimistic faith that the right purchase could make you the right person.
The products changed every decade. The anxieties were remarkably consistent.
Future historians will do the same thing to us. They will look past the campaigns and the platforms and the influencer integrations and ask: what were these people actually afraid of? What did they need so badly they were willing to be sold it a thousand times a day?
"Advertising is not a mirror of culture. It is a record of what culture was afraid to look at directly."
The answer, in 2026, is not flattering. We are selling belonging in an era of radical disconnection. We are selling purpose to people who feel purposeless. We are selling authenticity industrially. We are selling the planet back to the people we took it from, in the form of sustainable packaging and carbon offset programmes, and calling it progress.
The best thing you can do in any era of advertising is resist the temptation to sell people back their own longing. Give them something real instead. It is rarer than it sounds.
None of this is an argument for despair. It is an argument for honesty. The advertising that will age well — that historians will point to as evidence of a civilisation that occasionally knew what it was doing — is the advertising that told a true thing about a real product to a person it respected.
In a hundred years they will look at what we made and ask what we believed.
It is worth deciding the answer now, before the work decides it for us.