It is a matter of public interest that [private economic] decisions, in the aggregate, be intelligent and well informed. To this end, the free flow of commercial information is indispensable.
­Harry Blackmun ¹ (jurist)

Great advertising is a storyteller, a romantic voice, an emotional persuader....
It must persuade in a way that romances and lures the customer unsuspecting into the brand's sticky web.
­David N. Martin ² (ad man)

When we use TV, we're not using it to support First Amendment rights or artistic freedoms,
we're using it because it's a good business decision for our client...
­Betsy Frank ³ (ad woman)

Communication is the handmaiden of commerce.

America's channels of public discourse serve more and more as the purveyors of private profit. Daily, our nation's mass media cater to the desires of the marketplace as they deliver a feast of messages to consume. These messages remind us, in Madonna's words, that "we are living in a material world." ⁴ Yet these messages are more than solicitations to buy­they are the codes of our culture. In this commercial domain, we are largely the sum of what we buy.

"We live by symbols," said Oliver Wendell Holmes. ⁵ No symbol is more celebrated in our system of free speech than his icon of the marketplace of ideas. ⁶ In the ideal marketplace, there is a "free trade in ideas" ⁷ that fosters rational decisions by the citizen. In the real marketplace, however, there is a free trade in commercial images that encourages fantasized decisions by the consumer. Much discourse moves between these two poles, though America's commercial culture tends ever more away from the ideal and toward the real marketplace. Ironically, this real marketplace is often surrealistic: it is a place where the consumer exchanges money for magic, where commercial communication promises fantasy more than utility. This, at least, characterizes much in the marketplace of ideas as it operates in our system of mass advertising. It is a system frequently premised on the substitution of imagery for idea. Thus, it transforms the marketplace of ideas into a marketplace of commercial symbols.

In our culture of advanced capitalism, there is a striking redundancy in the notion of "commercial speech." ⁸ More specifically, public discourse cannot be significantly separated from the influences of commercialism.  As Burt Neuborne, a First Amendment authority and a spokesman for the Association of National Advertisers, accurately observes: "As a means of expressing shared values and a common national ideology, advertising dwarfs any other genre of communication." ⁹ To ignore the influences of commerce is to misunderstand the nature of much discourse in modern America. To overlook the relationship between commerce and communication is to place the First Amendment in a false light. To comprehend more fully the phenomenon of commercial speech, we must look beyond First Amendment cases and commentary to the actual ways in which our culture communicates about and through commodities. We must think less about the marketplace of ideas and more about the marketing of items. Today, we stand to learn more about the operations and values of social communication from Saatchi & Saatchi ¹⁰ than from Holmes and Brandeis.

To this end, we start from the beginning. Part I presents an account of the commercial message­making industry and the culture of modern mass advertising. We mark the movement from the product­information format that typified early mass advertising to the "lifestyle" format more in vogue today. We then examine the processes and consequences of modern mass advertising and contrast these to a model that we label "classified communication." Part II discusses two key free speech values­rationality and individuality­as they are reconfigured in the new ages of "reason" and "self." ¹¹ Finally, Part III explores free speech options in our capitalistic system and argues that, in much of our culture, image is all, truth is irrelevant, there is no right to know, and we are as we consume. Against this backdrop, if modern commercial expression is to be constitutionally protected in a more honest way, it is primarily because it is speech in the service of selling. What this portends for the individual and the culture, and for the defenders and critics of commercial speech, is the subject of all that follows.