Dick Cavett narrates this history of the American advertising industry, tracing it from nineteenth-century patent medicine hucksters to the branding wars of the late twentieth century. Archival commercials and print ads carry much of the story, from Alka-Seltzer jingles to Volkswagen's "Think Small" campaign and the Marlboro Man, showing how copywriters and art directors learned to sell not just products but identities and lifestyles. Advertising executives, historians, and cultural critics appear on camera to explain how techniques shifted with each new medium, from newspapers and radio to television, and how psychology and market research were folded into pitches over the decades. The film treats advertising as a mirror of American consumer culture, tracking how campaigns responded to depression, war, prosperity, and social change. It moves briskly through decades of case studies rather than dwelling on any single agency or brand, using the ads themselves as the evidence for how persuasion changed as audiences did.