Ads and Historic Diminution of Thought

I've been listening to XM Radio and the old-time radio channel. There's a pleasure in listening to voices not engaged in bombast or wrapped in treacle. Aside from the audio drama and comedy, there is the occasional commercial from the 40s or 50s. They often seem humorous in this time, with earnest announcers mentioning the supposed benefits to consumers of some product. The juxtaposition seems humorous because of the contrast - back then, certainly big promised of big happiness from big buying. But the tone is unlike anything you might hear today. There is no rushing breathless voice urging you like a lover moaning in the dark, no dazzling effects to stun someone's senses. The pitches are generally calm and almost reasoned. Oh, it's not as though they were rational appeals. Clearly the marketers were appealing to emotion with a veneer or rationality for respectability. Yet, they were at least a tacit nod to some intellectual capacity on the part of the audience. Think of some of the classic advertisements, like the one asking, "Do you make these common mistakes in English?" Are today's advertisers savvier than their predecessors, trying to bypass any intellectual content? Or are they following a trend that actually doesn't work? Companies often think they are much smarter than their customers - though a quick look at the performance of most would make you wonder whether it was the customers who were smarter. Perhaps, by eliminating the attempt to even talk to the thinking portion of the brain, helping to create at least rationalizations for emotional desires, they are undercutting their own effectiveness.