What A World Without Shame-Based Advertising Looks Like

The History of Shame as Marketing

The use of shame as a marketing mechanism isn't new, but its systematic development as an industry practice is largely a 20th century American invention.

Claude Hopkins, whose 1923 book Scientific Advertising is still read in marketing programs, formalized the principle of problem-solution advertising: identify a problem (real or manufactured), frame the product as the solution, and sell the relief from the problem rather than the product itself. Hopkins applied this most famously to toothpaste: Pepsodent's campaigns in the 1920s popularized the concept of "film" on teeth — a concept Hopkins essentially invented — as something disgusting that required daily intervention. Toothpaste existed before Pepsodent, but the shame about not using toothpaste was a marketing creation.

Albert Lasker at the Lord and Thomas agency pioneered the use of social shame in advertising, creating campaigns that made people afraid of bad breath (Listerine's "halitosis" campaign of 1924, which popularized a medical term that had rarely appeared in public discourse before), body odor, and dandruff in ways that permanently changed consumer behavior and created entirely new product categories.

These early shame campaigns shared a structure that has remained essentially constant for a century: (1) identify or invent a normal human characteristic; (2) frame it as a deficiency or failure; (3) create social consequences for the deficiency; (4) offer the product as the remedy. The Listerine halitosis campaign was perhaps the purest early execution: it took a normal body function (mouth odor, which virtually everyone experiences) and constructed a social narrative in which having that normal function made you unlovable, professionally unsuccessful, and socially isolated. Sales of Listerine increased 7,000% between 1921 and 1927.

Edward Bernays extended this framework beyond hygiene into lifestyle, status, and identity. His most famous campaign — "Torches of Freedom," which encouraged women to smoke cigarettes in public in 1929 — worked not through shame but through its mirror: the promise of liberation from shame. The shame being activated was about femininity, constraint, subordination. The cigarette was positioned as relief. The underlying architecture was identical: find the psychological wound, apply the product.

What the Research Shows About Advertising's Effects

The empirical literature on advertising's effects on psychological wellbeing — particularly for women and children — is extensive and consistent in its findings.

Body image: A 2008 meta-analysis by Grabe, Ward, and Hyde, published in Psychological Bulletin, synthesized 77 studies on media exposure and body image in women and girls. The meta-analysis found that exposure to media portraying thin, idealized body types was significantly associated with increased body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal, and disordered eating. The effect size was moderate and consistent across studies, methods, and populations. This finding has been replicated so many times it is now considered established.

Self-worth: A series of studies by Jennifer Crocker at the University of Michigan found that people who base their self-worth on appearance — a contingency strongly reinforced by appearance-based advertising — show elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, and lower levels of autonomy, genuine self-esteem, and academic performance. The emphasis on appearance as a basis for worth doesn't make people care more about their appearance in healthy ways; it makes them more vulnerable to shame when they fall short of impossible standards.

Adolescent mental health: The relationship between social media — which is largely an advertising delivery mechanism — and adolescent mental health has become one of the most studied questions in contemporary psychology. Jean Twenge's research, detailed in iGen (2017), shows that depression, anxiety, and loneliness among American teenagers increased sharply after 2012, with the inflection point closely correlated with the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media. Jonathan Haidt's more recent work in The Anxious Generation (2024) synthesizes a large body of evidence pointing to the same conclusion: social media, and particularly the comparison and inadequacy loops it generates, has produced a genuine mental health crisis among young people.

The Meta internal documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021 are particularly damning because they represent the company's own research. A slide from a 2019 internal presentation reads: "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls." Another notes that "teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression." Meta had this data and made product decisions that prioritized engagement over this evidence.

The Dove Campaign: Success and Contradiction

Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign, launched in 2004, is the most discussed example of advertising that attempted to work against rather than through shame. The campaign featured women with diverse body types, ages, and skin tones — explicitly departing from the thin, young, white ideal that dominated advertising at the time. The message was explicit: your body is beautiful as it is. You don't need to change to be worthy.

The campaign was — by conventional marketing metrics — enormously successful. Global sales of Dove products increased from $2.5 billion to $4 billion in the decade following the campaign's launch. The "Real Beauty" spots received significant earned media coverage and were widely discussed as a genuine cultural intervention.

But Dove is owned by Unilever, which simultaneously owned Axe — the men's body spray brand whose advertising has featured some of the most aggressive and explicit sexual objectification of women in the industry. While Dove ran ads celebrating women's diverse bodies, Axe ran ads featuring women's bodies as objects that men could obtain through correct product use. Same parent company. Same profit motive. Different shame vectors being worked.

This contradiction is not hypocrisy so much as it is the market logic of shame advertising operating at scale: different products address different shame vectors. Dove sells relief from the shame of not being beautiful enough. Axe sells men relief from the shame of not being sexually successful enough. Both products, different shame muscles.

The Real Beauty campaign also generated academic critique from scholars like Rosalind Gill, who argued that it represented "commodity feminism" — the co-option of feminist language to sell products, without any fundamental challenge to the underlying system. Real Beauty didn't challenge the idea that women's worth is connected to their appearance; it expanded the definition of acceptable appearance while keeping appearance-based worth at the center of the offer.

This is the structural limit of reforming shame advertising from within a commercial framework. Even the most progressive advertising exists to sell products. And products are sold more effectively when people feel a need for them. The need is more reliably manufactured through inadequacy than through contentment.

What Other Countries Have Done

Several countries have implemented regulatory frameworks that partially limit the most harmful advertising practices.

France passed legislation in 2017 requiring that digitally altered images of models used in advertising be labeled "photographie retouchée" (retouched photograph). The regulation is limited — it applies to commercial images of models, not editorial fashion photography, and enforcement has been inconsistent — but it represents the first regulatory acknowledgment in a major economy that unrealistic body ideals in advertising cause documented harm.

Norway went further in 2021, requiring that all retouched images in advertising — including those shared by influencers on social media — be labeled. Violations are subject to fines. The law explicitly cites body dissatisfaction and eating disorders as harms to be addressed.

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has issued rulings against specific advertisements that were found to promote unrealistic beauty ideals or use excessive retouching. The rulings are case-by-case and do not constitute a comprehensive framework, but they establish that advertising content can be regulated for psychological harm, not just factual accuracy.

The most comprehensive restrictions exist around advertising to children. Sweden and Norway banned advertising to children under 12 in broadcast media decades ago. The UK has extensive restrictions on advertising to children, including a 2022 extension of the ban on junk food advertising to include online and social media contexts. The EU's General Data Protection Regulation limits the use of personal data for targeted advertising to minors.

What does not exist, in any major economy, is a comprehensive framework for regulating shame-based advertising techniques themselves — the emotional architecture that manufactures inadequacy before offering the product as solution.

What Would Change Economically

The economic objection to restricting shame-based advertising is that it would reduce advertising's effectiveness and therefore reduce economic activity. This argument assumes that the manufactured demand created by shame advertising is a net economic good — which requires ignoring the costs it generates.

The economic costs of shame-based advertising are real and partially quantifiable:

The healthcare costs of eating disorders in the United States are estimated at $64.7 billion annually, according to the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders. Eating disorders are the deadliest mental health conditions, with mortality rates significantly higher than depression or anxiety. The relationship between advertising-promoted body ideals and eating disorders is established in the research literature.

The productivity costs of poor mental health — anxiety, depression, poor self-image — associated with advertising-driven inadequacy are harder to quantify but substantial. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety disorders cost the global economy $1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

The pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries, which depend heavily on shame-based advertising for demand, collectively extract significant spending from people who are responding to manufactured needs rather than genuine preferences. A 2019 analysis estimated that approximately 25-30% of cosmetics spending is driven by advertising-induced insecurity rather than genuine preference — a transfer of resources from consumers to producers that does not reflect underlying preferences.

Against these costs, what advertising that doesn't exploit shame would look like: advertising built on genuine product differentiation, honest claims about what products do, aspirational rather than deficit-based emotional appeals, and trust in consumers to make choices based on accurate information.

The economic transition would be disruptive — industries built on manufactured inadequacy would contract. But the transition would also free resources currently consumed by shame-economy spending for uses that more accurately reflect people's actual preferences and needs.

The World Without It

A world without shame-based advertising would not be a world without commerce or even a world without advertising. It would be a world where companies compete on actual product quality and genuine consumer value rather than on the effectiveness of their psychological manipulation.

That world is better for the obvious reasons: less eating disorder, less depression, less anxiety, less of the chronic low-grade inadequacy that is now the ambient condition of life in a consumer economy. But it's also better for less obvious reasons.

When people feel adequate, they make different choices. They're less susceptible to political manipulation that works through the same inadequacy circuits as advertising (you're not safe enough, not powerful enough, not respected enough — vote for this). They're less likely to consume as a form of self-medication for shame. They're more capable of the cooperative behavior that solving collective problems requires.

The connection between commercial shame and political shame is not metaphorical. Brené Brown's research found that shame drives disconnection, and disconnection is the substrate of both depression and tribalism. A culture systematically trained to feel inadequate is a culture more vulnerable to authoritarian politics, more susceptible to scapegoating, more prone to the zero-sum thinking that makes collective action impossible.

The advertising industry, by manufacturing inadequacy at scale, is not just harming individual consumers. It is degrading the social and psychological substrate that democratic civilization requires to function.

Regulation is necessary but not sufficient. The deeper change is cultural: a decision, made broadly enough to shift norms, that manufacturing inadequacy is not an acceptable business model. That people's psychological vulnerabilities are not raw material to be exploited for profit.

That decision would not just improve mental health statistics. It would change who we are — or rather, it would allow us to be more fully who we already are, without the constant interference of a system designed to convince us that who we are is never quite enough.

Human dignity is not a product. It cannot be sold because it cannot be manufactured.

Any system that depends on people not knowing this is a system that deserves to end.