One of the ads I saw before watching 2 movies last month was one about “Little Deviants”. It tries to sell a very boring-looking car (the Scion) by showing society as divided into 2 classes: the Sheeple, who look like sheep; and the Little Deviants, who gleefully kill and eat the Sheeples. The end of the commercial shows a Sheeple desperately running away from one of the Little Deviants, who has just killed all his companions, and looks to rescue to a Scion that just pulled up at the curb. The window opens, and another Little Deviant leans out the window, and eats most of the Sheeple, flinging his dismembered head out onto the front of the car to become a hood ornament.

Toyota also has a video game to go along with the commercial, which explains further that the “Sheeple” have “spread their gray disease” throughout the world, and that your task is to kill as many of them as possible (although they don’t seem to be doing anybody any harm). Then you use their body parts as equipment. Eventually, you use their blood to produce new Scions.

I know that comparing somebody to Hitler is considered bad form, but really – they’re begging for it.

Toyota says, in response to questions, that “People that find it offensive are not our target.”

I googled for comments on this ad just now, and the only people I found who were upset about it were, sadly, right-wing conservatives:
http://www.rightwingnews.com/mt331/2007/07/murder_demons_death_camps_toyo.php?comments=show

I remember purchasing candy numerous times when I was 7, and I still consider those decisions to be no less rational than any others I have made.

Inconsistent time preferences are arguably not irrational. Is there any evidence that this effect also happens with probability judgments, as opposed to simple preferences?

Most notably, this would be Ariel Dorfman; chilean exile (Pinochet tried to have him killed, thought he had and gleefully announced his “death” prematurely). Dorfman wrote How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1984) ISBN 0-88477-023-0. The subject of your post is ironic considering Dorfman’s essay. Also strongly recommended is The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds (1983, 1996) ISBN: 978-0140256376, which further discourses on the effect of US imported media functioning as an agent of imperialism. Quite an eye opener.

It’s so obvious that these effects are real that it takes almost a wilful refusal to acknowledge reality to deny it — to suggest that someone, somewhere, is making a rational decision to purchase candy bars at age 7 (or allow their child to do the same), or to purchase lottery tickets as an adult, or to become an alcoholic, or to become addicted to cigarettes. A lot of people purchase products, every single day, that predictably make their lives a misery, that cause a loss of welfare under any set of preference orderings that any sane person can be expected to endorse. And appealing to some kind of intuition about people’s utility functions being readable off their behavior to state the opposite is nothing more than a reductio of that intuition.

Regarding the Nestle Crunch example, quite a lot of advertising is essentially a zero-sum game for the advertisers. Consider the Burger Wars or the Soda Wars: when Pepsi gains me as a customer, Coke loses me as a customer. When Nestle gains, Hershey loses and vice-versa. I might get tired of one product and switch to another for a while, then switch back. Most of the time when ads remind me of a latent preference and cause a change it’s at the expense of a different consumer product.

But if an ad grows the relevant market and convinces me to buy more Crunch bars at the expense of healthier foods or less food, there are both negative and positive externalities associated with that. If I start buying them I presumably enjoy the taste of Crunch bars more than they cost (including health costs as well as monetary costs) so my purchase should produce a net consumer surplus for me.

“If the positive association doesn’t linger very long, what this amounts to is inducing people to buy a product for a benefit that goes away.”
That seems like an argument that advertisers should continue to advertise to you even after you’ve bought the product, in order to strengthen and extend the positive association. And, in fact, they do that. Is that what you meant to imply?

(Incidentally, Hummers get 17 mpg.)